


May The Sunrise Bring Hope Where It Once Was Forgotten

by deathmallow



Category: Red Dead Redemption
Genre: (handholding intensifies), Alternate Ending, Battle Couple, F/M, Fix It Fic, Friends to Lovers, Friendship is Magic, Gen, Grief/Mourning, I insist, Mutual Pining, Slow Burn, and arthur totally survives, and damn does she deserve some pov, but it sure ain't tahiti, canon-ish anyway, cholera is a bastard, correcting the lack of arthur's survival in rdr2, correcting the lack of ponchos in rdr2, dramatic disaster bi, eventual sadie/arthur, fake married, fic might be the closest we get to sadie as a playable character, gratuitous dancing, gratuitous handholding, historical medicine, idiots to lovers, oh arthur, oh look i wrote another incredibly long saga, party like it's 1899?, postgame, ride with me, terminal lumbago, tuberculosis is a bastard, we stan an outlaw queen, wherein arthur and sadie go international, wherein i ua the ending
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-11-28
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2019-09-03 13:35:38
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 41
Words: 364,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16767373
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deathmallow/pseuds/deathmallow
Summary: After so much effort trying to figure out how he wants to die, now Arthur Morgan has to figure out how he wants to live.  After hanging on to get revenge on the O'Driscolls, Sadie Adler isn't sure what comes next either. Surviving sometimes is the easy part--living is harder.  (UA for the end of the final Chapter 6 mission, "Red Dead Redemption" and beyond).





	1. Wapiti: Greater Love Hath No Man

**Author's Note:**

> Title from Iron and Wine's "Upward Over The Mountain". 
> 
> I'm continuing the game's format with sections/"chapters", so here's the breakdown, to be updated as necessary. I'm also going to try to give each fic chapter a "mission" title as a nod to one of the best games I've played in my life.
> 
> Chapter VII: WAPITI (Ch 1-4)  
> Chapter VIII: LAS HERMANAS (Ch 5-14)  
> Chapter IX: CHUPAROSA I (Ch 15-24)  
> Chapter X: CHUPAROSA II (Ch 25-32)  
> Chapter XI: MINNEWAKAN (Ch 33-40)  
> Chapter XII: BONNE CHASSE (Ch 41-)
> 
> Warnings for violence, language, and eventual sexuality. Some non-graphic discussion of topics such as child abuse, terrorism, genocide, and sexual assault.

Living in the Grizzlies as Sadie had, patience was a thing she’d necessarily learned, because winter was slow time, biding time, waiting on the thaw, then it came and it was a flurry of activity, rushing to grasp the opportunities of spring and summer before they slipped away again into fall and the next coming snow. The rhythm of an outlaw camp hadn’t been so different--or at least, for those as were riding out. Planning, waiting, a frenzied burst to execute the plan, then on to the next turn of the cycle.

So much as she wanted to get them out of tent pitched by the ramshackle ruins of a cabin on the edge of the marsh immediately, get Tilly and Abigail and Jack the hell out of here, there had to be patience to let it be done right. Too many folks had died already for this. She wasn’t going to see that be in vain. In November the darkness fell so early. But dawn would be here soon, and then they could ride. She’d get them down to St. Denis, since Abigail slipped away before being identified by the Pinkertons when they caught Hosea, so none of them would be wanted for the whole Goddamn mess at the bank. Had that really been less than two months ago? It felt like a lifetime had passed since. 

St. Denis, then, and from there--well, they could figure it out where each of their paths led. It helped that Tilly had a sack of cash Arthur had handed over from that last train robbery, four thousand dollars in it, and a stack of money from Arthur besides, and no camp stash needing half. They’d silently split the take, Tilly and her exchanging a glance, giving half the cash to Abigail without question. Sensed they’d have given her even more if she would have taken it.

Abigail still tried to refuse, tried to insist they split it equally, three ways. “You need it too,” she said, Jack sitting there playing silently with a broken wooden toy cat he’d found in a dusty corner of the ruined cabin. He hadn’t asked after John yet, and heartless bastard that Dutch Van Der Linde was, at least he’d spared Abigail having to break that news to her boy. Abigail sat there, hair straggling loose, eyes hollow and exhausted in the glow of lantern light in the grey of pre-dawn. Though wasn’t that exhaustion true for them all? Sadie felt like she hadn’t slept soundly since leaving Clemens Point, or maybe, truthfully, since Ambarino. “Since I assume you ain’t heading back to your ranch, Sadie, and you got no family left to go to, Tilly.”

She shook her head. “No. I ain’t never going back up there.” Jake would understand. There was nothing left except a burned out ruin, and knowing how utterly the O’Driscolls had destroyed what happiness she’d had there. There was no reason to ever see that. She carried it within her all the same.

“Then don’t you two be noble fools. A woman alone in this world needs some money of her own.” She reached out, brushed her fingers over Jack’s hair, and Sadie could see her trying hard to hold it together, make plans, all while wanting to fall apart. She reached out, put her hand on Abigail’s shoulder briefly in comfort. Abigail reached up for a moment, covered Sadie’s hand with her own, and then let go.

“We’ll have it. This will be just fine for me to start over,” Tilly said. “You remember you told me what it was, being a woman in this world that don’t care for us? Don’t you be a noble fool either. You’ve got Jack to think about. Take the money. Sadie and me, we both want you to have it.” Abigail looked away, then nodded slowly.

Three women in a tent in the marsh, sitting by the light of a single lantern burning low, trying hard to think of what future they had now, how to get away clean. They’d be the last ones who got away. Charles had stayed up with the Wapiti after the attack on Cornwall’s oil business, ready to get out soon. Pearson and Mary-Beth and Swanson and Trelawney and Uncle and Karen, slipped away. Karen was maybe dead by now, who knew. John, Lenny, Hosea, Sean, and Kieran, dead and buried already. Bill and Javier and Micah--well, to hell with them anyway, and their talk about loyalty and blindness to Dutch’s bullshit. Arthur, the damn fool, determined to go give himself up to accomplish--what? Try to talk reason into Dutch one last time? Shoot Micah dead? She didn’t know. She only knew he’d had to do it, and so she hadn’t stopped him. But here she was, and it was as much the feeblest hope that somehow that man would make it through even whatever he’d thought to do as the need to wait for daylight that kept her here. He was sick, weak, struggling. She’d had to let him go take care of things himself, bound by the promise to look after Abigail and Jack, but she couldn’t stand to leave him behind.

Finally as the faint glow of dawn lit the back panel of the tent, facing east over the water, right about the point she saw Jack beginning to doze again, the muffled plopping rhythm of a horse’s hooves sucking into the marsh mud caught her ear. She gestured for the other two to shut up and reached for the repeater, pointing it at the tent flap, listening intently. The call came then from their visitor. “Abigail? Jack? Tilly? Mrs. Adler? You in there?” It was a familiar voice, but not Arthur’s soft rasping croak. This voice was husky and light, and impossible.

In a rush of muddy and wet skirts, Abigail pushed up from the pallet and was out the tent flap in a tearing hurry, calling his name. “John? Johnny?” Sadie made it out herself, Tilly by her side, in time to see her grab John with such force it near bowled him over into the sticky mud, and then the two of them were laughing, crying, clutching each other, talking over each other in their questions. Seeing that there, their love shining pure and sweet, something ached in her, a still-raw scar of a thing she’d had and cherished and then had torn away.

The two finally calmed down enough for Abigail to take him by the hand and lead him into the tent. Sadie took one last look outside, seeing nobody else approaching, then turned back, leaving the flaps open this time. Jack rushed to his father, and John knelt, hugging the boy tightly. “What happened?” Sadie finally asked. “Dutch said he came back and found you dead, John. That the patrol killed you by the time he got back.”

“Dutch got real good at spinning lies, huh?” John said grimly, still sitting on his haunches, but letting Jack go. “Wouldn’t lift a damn finger to get me out of Sisika, so I doubt he come back at all to look for me, not really. I ran, hid out in the swamp. Made it back to the Hollow just in time to see it all coming apart. Arthur apparently come on in ready to start the fight and well, things, they went crazy. Everyone still left choosing sides. Me and Arthur, of course, and then Bill, Javier, and Micah stuck with Dutch. Micah, he’s been the damn rat all along, he killed Susan, and then the Pinkertons come on in, and we was left running for it.” None of them spoke, listening to the tale John spun. “Got out through the caves, and across the river. Got our horses shot from under us, so we was climbing Bluestone Ridge on foot. He was...he said…” He paused, obviously struggling for the words, voice going low and rough as he looked down at his hands. “He said he couldn’t push himself any more, and we wasn’t both gonna make it, and that I needed to make it out of there. That I had you, Abigail, and you, Jack. And that he...it would mean a lot to him.” 

“So Arthur’s dead, then.” Now she saw it in the dim light--John was wearing Arthur’s hat, had his satchel slung over his shoulder. Arthur must have given them to him, sent him on his way. Something hit that damn scar inside her again. Another good man dead, one of the best she’d known, and for what? Maybe he wouldn’t have had that long the way things were going, even if he’d made it back to Copperhead Landing. But something blazed angrily within her that a dying man should have to spend his last days suffering like that, and die in all this stupidity. If anyone had deserved to find some life free of all this, by now, it was him.

“Yeah,” John said finally, barely more than a whisper. “He’s gotta be.” Abigail let out a strangled sound, half a sob, and held Jack closer. Sadie didn’t make a sound herself, but something within her keened in grief all the same. She’d known it was coming, people didn’t just shrug off TB like it was nothing, but she’d been in no way ready for it.

That made up her mind. She looked at Tilly, then at John. “Maybe you’d best go to Rhodes or even Valentine now, not St. Denis, and catch the train from there. Best go right now too, so you can catch an early train before things get too busy.” John was a wanted man, and therefore so much harder to hide. “You gonna be OK without me?”

It was Tilly who seemed to catch on first. “You’re going back?”

“I’ll be fine. Pinkertons don’t know about me.” The ones who did were rotting in their graves, anyway, so they were hardly talking. “I’m gonna see Arthur buried proper, at least. I owe that much to him.” John being there able able to look after his wife and boy gave her the freedom to do that, as far as she was concerned. She’d gotten them out, fighting to get Abigail free from the Pinkertons, no less. Now she would do this for him, and for her.

_She sat there huddling in the freezing cabin, wearing her boots which had been right near the door, and borrowed clothing from all the women, their names blurring in her mind. Tilly’s skirt, or had that been Karen? Someone’s wool socks, someone else’s shirtwaist, another’s spare mittens, yet another’s coat, and a man’s scarf with the scent of tobacco and aftershave. She felt like that too. Something made up of disjoint parts rather than one single thing._

_She wanted to do nothing so much as find a hot bath and furiously scrub herself all over and hope that helped, and then maybe grab a pistol and turn it on herself, or perhaps trek out into the snow to find and kill some of those O’Driscolls, or maybe both._

_Warily watching the men because they talked kindly, and they had women with them who didn’t act like prisoners which felt like it meant something good, but who knew what they were planning. She hadn’t slept a wink last night, and might not tonight either. Otherwise, there she was, sitting there and looking at the floor, shivering from cold and ordeal both, trying to lose herself in remembrance of good things, trying to escape memories of the recent bad things. A pair of boots entered her vision, men’s boots, scuffed and dirty. “Mrs. Adler.” Rough, deep, tired-sounding voice with the twanging tones of New Austin--one of the ones who’d been at her home. The big one, the one she’d heard talking and calling out as he’d rummaged through her things. “Lenny, Javier, and me, we went back to your place. We buried your husband, proper.”_

_Digging a grave in the snow--no wonder he sounded exhausted. She looked up at him. Morgan, was that the surname they’d called him yesterday? “Don’t know why you done that, but...”_

_He gave an awkward, dismissive half-shrug, ducking his head, hiding his eyes from her below the brim of his black hat. “It needed doing. I told you, we’re bad men. But we ain’t animals.” No, maybe not. Not like the O’Driscolls. He reached in his pocket, pulled something out, gingerly held it out to her in one gloved hand. Her and Jake’s wedding portrait, out of its frame and with one edge singed. How happy they’d been that day, getting married down in Blackwater, taking a couple of days in a fancy hotel and seeing little of the city outside of that hotel room, then heading north to start their life together. “We looked around a bit, to see if there was anything else of yours to salvage, or that we could use. Found this near the fireplace. Frame got broke, but--thought you might want to have it back.”_

_She reached out and took it, not able to look at it just then, but grateful that he’d think of it, grateful that she had at least one thing to call her own, and it was this. “Thank you, Mr. Morgan.”_

That picture was tucked in her satchel even now. He’d helped see Jake buried, when she was just a stranger they’d rescued. Now she would return that favor for him, hoping she’d get there before the Pinkertons could drag his body back to St. Denis or Blackwater to display like some damn trophy buck if they were feeling particularly smug or vengeful. _I can still fight_ , he’d insisted angrily just yesterday in Van Horn. If she was sure of anything, it was that he’d taken plenty of Pinkertons with him along the way. “I’ll come with you--” John said immediately, making to get to his feet.

“No, you ain’t,” she told him coolly. “You say he died to get you away clean. Said that was what he wanted, even. Then you do what he told you, John, and you take Abigail and Jack, and get as far away from all this as you can.”

John stood up, moving towards Abigail, obviously accepting that, even reluctantly. Tilly spoke up next, voice soft and uncertain. “We was all talking once in camp, Arthur, Lenny, Hosea, and me, about them as we’d buried already. How we’d like to be buried when our time came. Arthur, he tried to say it didn’t matter to him, but then he said…” She inhaled, steadying herself, her gaze rising to meet Sadie’s, eyes wise and old beyond her few years. “You should bury him facing west, so he can watch the sunset, and remember the happy times we had out that way.”

She nodded. She could do that for him. It seemed little enough, but it was all she could do at this point. “Thanks, Tilly. John, where’s he at? As best you know.” She listened to him describing the path they’d taken from the top of Beaver Hollow. It would still be a bit of a search, but she thought she had a good idea of where to look. They had been up near the highest peak of Bluestone Ridge, along the border with Ambarino. If nothing else, the trail of bodies would likely be a good marker.

She looked the four of them over, knowing this was probably the last she’d see of them. They would have split up soon enough anyway. Maybe it was better that it was here and now, no lingering and painful farewells. No reason to keep in touch, not when they all wanted to get away from the wreckage of this. “You’re good folks, all of you. So...be well.” She touched the brim of her hat in salute. Then she slipped out from the tent, leaving them to it.

She saw the wisps of smoke from the half-burned camp as she approached it, and she was prepared to spin a tale if she ran into anyone, and get the hell out in a hurry. But she heard or saw no Pinkertons there--maybe they were busy chasing Dutch elsewhere, and she wished them every luck at that. She crept in, searched quickly. Boot prints in the mud, that was all, and some ruined tents and smoldering ruins. But she had to check, in case he’d made it back here off the ridge visible in the distance.

She found Susan Grimshaw’s body under some scorched canvas, and sighed. She hadn’t always liked the woman, her moments of kindness and protectiveness usually matched by the ones of iron and vinegar. She’d seen Grimshaw trying to throw her weight around and complaining about no respect, obviously annoyed that she couldn’t control the younger women as much as she’d liked. Knowing her own mind as Sadie did, it was bound to happen that the two of them would clash, and Grimshaw seemed glad to wash her hands of it with Sadie joining the hunters, and then the gang’s riders, and so they could skip the fights entirely. But from what John said, she’d died a bad death, a needless one. Just another one on a long list, seemed like. Crouched beside the body, Sadie carefully closed her eyes and wrapped the canvas around her. She would bury Grimshaw too, but finding Arthur came first. 

She grabbed a few things of hers that she’d left sitting there when they’d gone on the train job, given they’d then rushed out again to save Abigail. Hesitated for only a moment, hurrying over to Arthur’s bunk next, blanket neatly made up, in a mostly-unburned area of the camp. Taking some of his things--the pictures, that little flower in a jar, the horseshoe. No idea what some of it had meant to him, but he’d taken pains to return her wedding portrait to her from her own burned home. So she might as well bury all this with him rather than leave it for Pinkertons or scavengers paw it over.

Whistling up Bob, she got in the saddle and headed for Bluestone Ridge. Picking her way up towards the peak, she ran across a few blood pools and smears where the Pinkertons had recovered their dead, then the bodies of Old Boy and Zenobia, shot dead halfway up the slope just as John said. Arthur had ridden Buell, that big pale gold moody bastard of a stallion for a while after showing up in camp with him about a week ago, muttering something with downcast eyes about a dead friend leaving the horse to him. She hadn’t asked more. But after they went to Hanging Dog to take out the O’Driscolls for good, he’d left the stallion at the Valentine stables and took Zenobia from there, saying the stallion was too new to him, and he needed the little white Arabian for her trustiness and her speed for the days to come. “Zenobia and Buell, Mrs. Adler, I want you to have ‘em after I’m gone,” after he told the stable owner she could come and take the stallion herself. Walking out from the stable, he gave her a small, tired smile. “See, John Marston, I fear he don’t much know a good horse, so I’d rather see fine ones like them two with someone who has the brains for it.” Poor Zenobia, faithful to the end. As to Buell, it looked like a trip to the Valentine stable was in order before she went wherever the hell she’d end up. She wasn’t sure what she’d do with him, but better that than leaving him to be sold to someone else in a few weeks for clearing Arthur’s stable bill that would go unpaid now, or worse, the butcher.

She had to go slower than she’d like, approaching Bluestone Ridge, wary of searchers. She had to duck one patrol, and heard another in the distance, but that was it. Obviously the Pinkertons had turned the chase to the living, though they’d left a few bodies up on the heights they hadn’t recovered yet. It was fully into the morning, sun risen high, when she found Arthur almost exactly where John said they’d parted ways. Lying there as if he’d gone no further, slightly propped up against some rocks. Head turned to the east, so had he watched that sunrise one last time, rather than the sunset Tilly had said he’d so loved? No gunshot wounds, so unlike Grimshaw he looked more or less peaceful. The only thing spoiling that image was the fact he’d somehow taken one hell of a beating, face blood-spattered and bruised, both eyes blackened. Who had he been fighting? Likely she’d never get answers. No matter. That wasn’t why she was here.

Reaching for her blanket on Bob’s back to wrap him in, she sighed, kneeling down beside him on the mist-dampened stone. “Damn brave bastard, I wish you ain’t done it like this,” she told him quietly. “But what you set out to do, you done it. John got back to Abigail and Jack. They’ll be on their way to Rhodes with Tilly right now. Abigail said something about Canada, so they'll be well away from it all.”

But when she touched his cheek one last time in farewell, her brow furrowed in confusion. His cheek was cool, but he wasn’t cold and stiff, and he should be. He’d been dead out here for hours. When she looked closer, struggling to see beneath the blood and bruises even in the bright light of the morning, she saw it. He still had the hint of fever flush in his cheeks, and holding her hand near his nose and mouth, she felt the faintest stirring of breath against her palm. “Oh, hell,” she breathed, mind suddenly spiraling in a hundred different directions. “You’re still alive, huh?”

He wouldn’t be alive for long if she didn’t get him out of here, though. Suffocating slowly from the tuberculosis to begin, plus then he’d pushed himself to exhaustion with John, got badly beaten next, then been out here near all night too with the foggy cold and damp, and his wet clothes said he’d been through a bit of a rainshower besides. Damn good thing Pinkertons or animals hadn’t found him first. _Sorry, Miss Grimshaw._ Her priorities had changed. The woman wouldn’t blame Sadie for it. Pain in the ass that she could be, she’d cared for Arthur, in her way, and she would have put the living before the dead, no question. 

Where to take him? He needed to get somewhere south, somewhere hot and dry, to maybe try to deal with his tuberculosis. But he wouldn’t survive that trip immediately. She needed to get him somewhere to try to get him stable enough to worry about the disease trying to kill him in months rather than him dying in minutes or hours. For now, she couldn’t take him back down to Beaver Hollow. It was a miserable place to begin, and that would be the first place the searchers would look. Van Horn was right out after the mess they’d made shooting the place up yesterday afternoon to rescue Abigail. Any nearby town, really, because if she rode in with a half-dead man on her horse and got him a bed, word would get around about that, and Pinkertons would follow. But she couldn’t set up camp in the wilds with him either. He couldn’t survive roughing it for days or weeks to better be able to travel.

There seemed to be only one safe option within a few hours’ ride. She would have to take him to Wapiti. Charles was likely still there, and Arthur was some kind of friends with Chief Rains Fall besides. With luck, they’d be willing to let him hide and rest for a few days, and she knew damn well they were no friend to the government right now, so likely that nobody would rat him out to the Pinkertons.

Mind made up, she struggle to roll him into the blanket, thinking ahead. She’d have to sling him over Bob’s back anyway, and hope he survived that ride. Unconscious as he was, he wouldn’t be riding himself, or hanging on to her. So--make him look like a dead bounty to anyone passing her on the road, and keep him warmer in the blanket besides. Grabbing the knife at her hip, she carefully cut away some of the blanket from his face so he could breathe. She’d have to buy a new one later, but no matter. She’d been lucky enough that she could ride Bob all the way up the slope to this spot. But getting him up onto Bob was no easy task, because she was a damn strong woman from years of farm work, but he was still a heavy-boned man. Though she suspected she’d have had even more of a bitch of a time with it months ago, given how much weight he’d lost thanks to the TB. Still, she managed it, panting hard in the thinner mountain air as she settled and secured him. She laid a hand on his shoulder for a moment, pretty sure he couldn’t hear her, but needing to say it anyway. “You made it this far. You stay with me, Arthur Morgan.” Then she swung up into the saddle and once she’d picked her way down the mountain she dug her heels into Bob’s flanks and headed northwest for Wapiti as quickly as she could without pushing Bob too hard with the double burden, and praying the jostling wouldn’t kill Arthur.

They stopped her barely ten minutes into the ride, two Pinkertons along the road with their shield-shaped badges and ready rifles, calling out to her in the morning mist, asking where she was going in such a hurry. “Got a bounty I’m delivering to Annesburg, after I check in with my partner at O'Creagh's Run. We was both searching the area. Gotta let him know I found the man and the job's done. Then after that, I’d rather get the fella there and off my horse before he really starts to stink.”

“You think about taking a bath yourself?” one of them asked, a big, broadly built blond, eyeing her up and down. 

She shrugged, still trying to play it casual, though her heart pounded like a blacksmith’s hammer. “I’ve been living rough with running bounties. It’s late fall, boys. Too cold to wash up in a stream. A bath sounds real nice. It's on my list after I drop this sack of shit off at the sheriff’s.” A bath really did sound wonderful, and she did stink. They all did. They’d been living scared in bad territory in Shady Belle and Lakay, been outright living like animals in the Hollow. When they were busy fighting and turning on each other these last weeks, human things like baths fell by the wayside, too scared to venture too far into a town for something as suddenly luxurious as a bath when it could get them snapped up and arrested. Pearson had heated water for them for the first few weeks, and those that still cared had each headed down into the cave with hot water, some soap, and a cloth for some privacy to wash up, but even that had vanished about a week ago as the mood got worse. 

“Who’s the bounty?” his companion asked, and from his sharp, foxy eyes, she pegged him as the smarter of the two. He poked the blanket, pushed it aside slightly, prodding curiously at it. 

She thought furiously of the bounty posters she’d grabbed recently. “Murfree Brood boy. Caught him up on the ridge. He looked like Wally, or maybe it was Jeff? He didn’t give the name before shooting at me, and well, after that, he ain’t never telling nobody his name again. They’re all wanted for murder, kidnapping, doing indecent things to women. Gave me a hell of a fight. Guess I’ll lose the extra twenty-five dollars for hauling him in alive, but I gotta admit, killing him was a pleasure.” They’d been living like animals, true, but also like the Murfrees they’d run out of the Hollow, because she wasn’t sure they were fully human either. Hopefully Arthur’s hair, since some of that was about all the man could see, could pass for a Murfree at a glance. He'd cleaned himself up right before that train job, so maybe not.

“Reece, let her go,” the blond advised. She held her breath and willed Arthur to stay unconscious and limp, to not start to wake up and stir or cough at all right now. It would be the worst possible time.

“Should we take the man in ourselves?” Reece asked, still standing there, holding the blanket corner in his hand as if ready to yank away more of it for a better look.

Blond snorted derisively. “Don’t be unchivalrous. She killed him fair and square. Besides, we’ve got bigger fish to fry. Hill and Yancy have their claim already. Five thousand for Arthur Morgan, confirmed dead. But there’s still three thousand each for Bill Williamson and Javier Escuella. Four for John Marston and Micah Bell. Ten for old Dutch Van Der Linde himself. Nab some of those boys, you’re living like a king, and you want to worry about hauling in some dead sister-fucking Murfree trash who might be worth a hundred bucks at most, or probably nothing? That’s why bounty hunters like this gal _exist_ , to handle the little fish.”

She kept the reins in her left hand, right hand resting on her thigh to quickly grab her revolver if need be, her heels gently pressed to Bob’s sides, ready to spur him on too. “Ten thousand dollars, you say? Wouldn’t mind getting me a piece of that.” Five thousand dollars for Arthur? If they peeled back that blanket enough to get a look at his face, this was going to get messy, because at best they’d assume she was stealing his body. But they were the ones damn stupid enough to have not checked closely that he was dead when they’d presumably found him on the ridge. Saw a man who looked dead, and ran with that, greedy for the payday. Though she couldn’t blame them for the assumption. No reason to suspect he was alive, looking as he did. 

Reece smirked at that. “Federal bounty, only for authorized government agents, missy. Sorry. Only five hundred to a bounty hunter.” He let the blanket fall back into place, nodded towards Arthur, then looked up at her. “But we’ll let you be on your way with your quarry here. Piece of advice, though, if you want to get ahead in this business, make sure of who you’re shooting. One less Murfree savage regardless is a good thing for us all, but let’s hope there’s an actual bounty out there on him. Hate for you to drag him in to Annesburg for nothing.” Blond let go of Bob’s bridle and stepped back. 

She wanted to shoot Reece dead right there for that knowing, smug look on his face. Instead she forced a sweet smile. “Thank you, _sir_ , for the expertise. Good hunting to you.” Nudging Bob, she hit the trail, forcing herself to go north to make it look like she was headed to O'Creagh's Run and then to Annesburg as she’d said, then picking her way through the trees to turn west again. 

It was a quiet morning on the road, for which she had to thank God. She crossed paths with a mail rider from his clearly marked satchel and saddlebags, a hunter with a deer on his horse’s back, and that was it. She heard a few distant howls from wolves as she headed up into the Grizzlies, and she reassured Bob, murmuring lowly to him to keep him steady. Despite the day getting on towards noon, the temperature dropped again as she headed up into the mountains, air turning crisp and sharp. She slowed, wary of Bob’s footing, treacherous both where the frost hadn't melted and where it had, as it made the rock slick under Bob's hooves. She settled down deeper into her jacket, wishing she’d brought something warmer. She hadn’t expected to be riding into the Grizzlies in a rush, and if anyone knew what being unprepared in these mountains felt like, and what folly that was, it was her. She and Jake found that out three years ago, sure enough.

The sun was bright and noon-high as she rode into Wapiti, and she could see the difference here from when she’d last passed through with Charles a couple weeks ago dropping off some meat they’d hunted, before everything went to hell with Eagle Flies. At least half the hide tents were gone, most of the horses, and there weren’t many people out doing anything, a few older folks huddled deep into their robes as they slowly headed for a tent. The whole place had the air of something sad, abandoned, all the hopes and life leeched out of it.

She saw Taima’s spotted coat hitched near one of the tents, and Charles there, brushing her down, scratching her nose and feeding her something. “Charles!” she hailed him.

His head lifted, and immediately the air of quiet vanished from him, leaving him purposeful and intent. She tracked his gaze, saw it go to the blanket-wrapped bundle on Bob’s back. “What-- _who_ \--have you got there, Sadie?”

“It’s Arthur. I’ll explain, but right now, you gotta help me get him inside. I found him up on Bluestone Ridge, still alive. But he’s...he’s bad off.” Hopping down, she admitted, feeling a tightness in her throat, “He’s dying, or maybe dead by now, or--I don’t know. Once I got him up on Bob, and knew I was coming here, I wasn’t gonna stop to check.” She met his eyes. “I...I had to try, you know?” Even if he’d died along the way, she’d tried. That had to count for something. 

Charles didn’t hesitate, simply nodded. “Of course you did.” With Charles there, it was much easier, because he slung Arthur over his shoulder like the man weighed nothing. She felt the curious eyes of the Wapiti on them as Charles gestured for her to open the flap of his tent and go in, him following her, putting Arthur down right close to the fire.

She cut loose the ropes holding the blanket, unwrapping it, and felt the surge of relief at confirming that yes, Arthur was still breathing. More visibly so than he’d been on the ridge, even, though being bundled up in that blanket must have helped. But one deeper breath came back out with a racking wheeze that she didn’t like, and she didn’t realize she was holding her own breath, fearing it turning into a spasm of coughing, until she let it out in a long sigh when he settled back down again.

Charles took hold of Arthur’s arm, working it out of the sleeve of his damp jacket. “He’s cold, and those clothes are wet to boot. Help me out.” At that moment, she was thankful it was Charles and he had more than his share of sense, so they weren’t going to get into the notion that no matter how dire the situation, a woman undressing a man was something depraved, unless she wore his wedding ring. Horseshit. Like it wasn’t usually women who had the washing and laying out and dressing of the dead. Besides, she’d been a married woman. It wasn’t like she didn’t know exactly what bits a man had when his pants and underwear came off. Even if she’d been of a frame of mind for it, and he was a man she wanted as a lover rather than a friend, getting an eyeful of a man while he was this sick wasn’t going to turn on any kind of sinful thoughts anyhow.

If anything, the sight of Arthur as they got him undressed inspired pain for his sake, not lust. On a big-framed, formerly muscular man, the ravages of the tuberculosis looked even worse. No wonder they called it “consumption”, because it looked like he was a fragile husk that had been burned up from the inside out, a skeleton with skin stretched over it, dark blossoms of bruising on his prominent ribs and hipbones and elsewhere from the beating he’d taken. So this was what he’d come to in the end, after all the struggle, all the sacrifice: a half-dead man hiding on a mostly-abandoned Indian reservation, clinging to a thin thread of life somehow.

He’d lost all that weight, and she’d seen his face going thin, features sharp, exhausted and bloodshot eyes sunk in their sockets. He gave up shaving in Beaver Hollow, as did most of the men, in part because she suspected the exhaustion and hopelessness. Then he'd come back right before the train job, clean and with a fresh haircut and a clean shave, dressed in his finest clothes. She could only suspect what that had said--he was preparing himself to die. But he’d managed to hide a lot of it beneath his clothes, wearing that waxed canvas jacket most everywhere, tiredly saying he was cold. Probably was, given how thin she could now see he’d become. Undeniable now how much extra fabric there was in his shirt and pants, and how two of the holes in his belt were crudely hand-punched ones so he could cinch it smaller. 

Charles must have thought the same, because as he gently folded the heavy bison robe over Arthur’s shoulders, tucking him in to warm up, he said, “He hid a lot of it from us. We all knew he was sick, but I don’t much know how he kept going for as long as he did.” They’d all seen him finishing a job, leaning tiredly on rocks or a tree, struggling for breath. Coming back to camp, barely murmuring greetings, and dropping into his bunk to sleep for hours, coughing in his sleep, when in the summer she’d seen he could come in, fuss over everyone, run on a few hours’ sleep, and then ride right out again without missing a step.

His knuckles were bloody and beaten too. As weak as he was, as much pain as he’d taken, he’d still dealt some back out. Of course he had. 

Sitting down cross-legged on a wolf pelt, looking across the fire at Charles, she shook her head. He was a smart man, a truly good one, but on some things, he just didn’t know. “It was love that done it. Because that’s what love does to you. Keeps you going long past when you should break and give out.” She glanced down at the man under that robe, all ragged and battered and frail, and still probably the strongest man she’d ever know. If anyone could pull through after this, it would be Arthur Morgan. Stubborn bastard. “He loved us all enough to keep going, keep fighting. Wanted to give folks a chance.” Some of Uncle Will’s preaching had gone by the wayside over the years, but she easily could remember that one quote. _Greater love hath no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends._

“Sounds like you’ve got it about right,” he answered her. “How long do you need to stay?” He made an awkward grumble at that, waving a hand in an awkwardly apologetic gesture. “You’re welcome here in my lodge as long as you need, Sadie, you and Arthur both. But the people--we ain't staying.” He lifted a hand, gestured towards the door of the tent.

“I saw you was missing a lot of folk from when I was here last. Where’d they all go?”

“North, to Canada. The young ones headed out the morning after we came back with Eagle Flies. After we buried him. Paytah led them. The elders told them to go, to get ahead of the Army. Soldiers are hot on the trail of the ones who left, so that buys some time here, but ain’t nobody expecting them to hold off forever. The ones left are the ones who need more time to gather their strength for the journey. The mothers nearing their birthing time, the old, the weak, the sick.”

"Abigail and John and Jack was talking about heading north too, so it seems everyone's got notions of escaping to Canada." Now the quiet in camp made sense, given the few left were the weakest ones. “Sounds like Arthur fits in just about perfect.” She meant it to be darkly funny, but it came out strangely mournful all the same. She sighed, grabbed another log, threw it on the fire. “He needs time too. Like you was saying, to get stronger. If-- _when_ he wakes up and he can travel, he’s got to go south. Somewhere warm--”

“Tahiti?” Charles offered with a sly smile. “A tropical paradise, so I kept hearing.”

She couldn’t help but laugh at that, grateful to him for the lighthearted moment. “No, New Austin, or maybe all the way into Mexico.” She’d thought about getting the gang there before Dutch came back, given New Austin was familiar stomping grounds for her.

“I’d suggest Mexico. Get across the border, and away from the hornet’s nest. Pretty much what the Wapiti are doing with Canada.”

“Not a bad idea.” She'd have to try to brush up her half-assed bits of Spanish in a hurry, so that could get interesting. He wasn’t wrong. She knew New Austin, but wasn’t like they could hide out near Tumbleweed. Not with Arthur dying of TB as he was. He needed a doctor.

Charles reached for the coffee percolator sitting beside his pelt, pouring into a battered tin cup and holding it out to her. She took it, grateful for the warmth against her fingers, and the first sip of it warming her up from the inside. They'd come to a decent trust, her and Charles, in the weeks Dutch and the rest were gone on Guarma, trying to take care of everyone. It felt good to not have to worry or explain or justify, simply to be, and know he had her back here. “You’ll go with him?” he asked her.

She gave an awkward shrug. “Not like I can let the damn fool go by himself as he is, so--sure.” It helped ease her mind, having some sense of direction, clarity of purpose. Kept her from having to answer that question of _what now?_ that they were all facing, because here was a _right now_ that needed minding. “You want to come with us? Seems like you got your own folks to look after already, though.”

“I do. I stayed behind to do some hunting and the like, protect the ones here. I couldn’t leave Rains Fall to handle it all himself. ”

She couldn’t help but smile at him. “Love, huh?”

He gave her a slight smile back. “Guess so.” He looked at her more closely. “How long since you slept?”

She had to think about it, and think harder than she’d like. Last night was lost to traveling back to the Hollow, finding Arthur, and then the journey here to the Wapiti. Before that, she’d been rescuing Abigail with Arthur, then getting her to Copperhead Landing, and before that, they’d ridden on through from the train robbery. “Two days?”

“Thought so.” He indicated what she assumed was his own pallet, another bison robe. “Get some sleep, Sadie.” He got to his feet, crossing to her side of the fire and leaning down to put a hand on her shoulder. “Don’t worry. Snow Goose and I need to go hunt, but Red Shawl will come sit with him if I ask. She’ll come get you if he wakes up.”

“ _When_ he wakes up,” she insisted, but on the point of sleep, she wasn’t going to argue with him. She could feel the exhaustion pulling at her, like a kite on a string. Tugging off her boots, she crawled underneath the fur robe and fell asleep in what felt like a few seconds.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Wanted Poster for Arthur Morgan**  
PROCLAMATION!  
From the Pinkerton Detective Agency

Wanted Captured Dead or Alive  
ARTHUR MORGAN

$350 REWARD

Wanted for various crimes including numerous counts of robbery, assault and MURDER, including association with the theft of $150,000 from a boat in BLACKWATER and numerous associated killings.

Longstanding member of the notorious VAN DER LINDE gang, responsible for various BANK, TRAIN, and STAGECOACH robberies across the West, and associated with anti-American ideals and practices. Often found in the middle of violent dealings, and to be considered both dangerous and ruthless. 

Mid-thirties, tall, strongly built, fair, and clean-shaven. Speaks with pronounced New Austin accent. Scar on chin. Last seen heading north into the GRIZZLIES from BIG VALLEY, West Elizabeth.

PINKERTON DETECTIVE AGENCY OR THE NEAREST SHERIFF'S OFFICE


	2. Wapiti: Out Of The Fire, Into The Frying Pan

Arthur had thought the last couple of months were bad, living with the pain that seemed rooted so deep in him that it seeped into his very bones, breathing sometimes becoming like inhaling fire, and the slowly healing shoulder wound besides aching like he was still sticking that file into it to dig the buckshot out. This went beyond that. Everything hurt too much to bear, and his chest felt like a damn inferno raged inside of it. 

Then the coughing started and that was even worse because there was nothing left, no energy in him to brace against it, and everything was a dark red haze even behind his closed eyes. There it was again, the searing stab of pain, the blood in his mouth and then spitting it out, but the all-too-familiar taste of iron lingered on his tongue all the same.

That piece of shit Micah had sneered, _Hope you’re ready for hell_ , while they were fighting. Looked like this was it. Should have figured it was all too little, too late, and a few months of trying didn’t much make up for all the bad he’d done.

“Are you awake?” A voice too mild for devils or demons or whatever they were supposed to have down here. Though maybe that was deceptive. He’d been around enough con men and liars, been one himself, and he hadn’t heard much preaching but hadn’t they said old Lucifer himself was a fallen angel? Though unless Lucifer was a woman, they’d got that wrong. “Mr. Morgan?”

“Just about,” he managed, figuring it was best to face the music, opening his eyes, pushing to his side just enough to turn to face the sound, though it made everything flare again with pain. It was a woman sitting there all right, and he squinted blearily at her, not quite able to make her out yet. “Where am…?” Every word hurt too.

“You’re at Wapiti,” she told him, voice low and soft. 

Wapiti, then. Not dead? He’d sure as shit felt like that was all said and done up there on Bluestone Ridge, collapsing on that rock and gasping for every breath, blackness creeping in on the edges of his vision for what had to be the last time. Wapiti seemed impossible. John--John had gone to his family if he damn well knew what was good for him, and how else had he gotten here? “How?”

“Mrs. Adler brought you here this morning. You’re in Charles’ lodge.”

Sadie Adler? His tired brain couldn’t keep up with all of this. She’d been at Copperhead Landing too, looking after Abigail, Jack, and Tilly. “Mrs. Adler…”

“She’s here. I’ll wake her. She told me to when you woke up.” A dark shadow blocked his vision for a moment, crossing close to the fire, and lying there, he heard murmurs nearby. But the roaring was in his ears again, and he couldn’t breathe, and it was like struggling to keep his head above water, like that night of the wreck in the Caribbean when he couldn’t go any longer and slipped beneath the dark waves. 

It all faded out pretty quickly after that. Though as he slid under again, sinking back down into the black, he thought he heard Sadie Adler’s voice saying his name.

Things jumbled after that, real and not-real and dream and memory, and he wasn’t sure exactly which was which. Sadie’s face, telling him it would be OK. His daddy on the scaffold in San Francisco, spitting curses at the lawmen. Isaac at two, his hair gone dark as Eliza’s since Arthur saw him last, giggling and clutching Arthur’s shirt as he played pony down on all fours. Thomas Downes’ weary sunken eyes and exhausted face, pleading for mercy for himself, for his family, for that damn thickheaded moron Tommy, for the poor and starving. Rains Fall’s gentle gruff voice, as if from a distance. 

Hosea, staggering and falling dead in the street of St. Denis with a cry of agony. At the tailor’s, staring at himself in the mirror wearing nicer clothes than he could ever remember, Hosea laughing and saying with an affectionate pat on Arthur’s shoulder, “Well, that’ll fit a growing kid like you for a few months, anyway, but my, you shine up like a new penny.” 

Mary, pretty as a picture, slipping her hand into his, laughing as they walked in the summer evening. Mary, telling him that she’d marry Gerald Linton, trying to give his ring back, as he turned and walked away.

Dutch, letting go Arthur’s collar and saying with a grin, “Let us buy you a hot meal, my dear boy, and my associate and I would love to discuss opportunities in our...line of work, shall we say.” Dutch, staring down at him with nothing in his expression, nothing in his eyes, nothing at all as Arthur pleaded one last time, hoping that this would be enough and Dutch would do one right thing and deal with Micah, “He’s a rat. You know it and I know it.”

Fire, burning him from the inside out. Lenny, dead on a St. Denis rooftop. Sadie charging into Hanging Dog, yelling her husband’s name as a battle cry. That buck deer again, out in the woods, looking at him with gentle and wise eyes. Voices and words he couldn’t quite make out. A squalling baby’s cry, a low woman’s murmur.

He woke again with a startle, and the gasp of shock at the sudden awakening hurt his lungs like hell to boot, but the throbbing agony of his whole body had died down to a dull roar. Struggling, he managed to get an elbow underneath himself and prop himself up a little, fighting a heavy weight over him, holding him down, more than the constant pressure in his chest. Was someone sitting on him or what? Looking, focusing the riot in his brain as much as he could, he calmed down, seeing it was the thick hide and long hair of a bison robe.

The next realization was that he was drenched with fever-sweat and buck naked under the robe, which, if he felt like he could give more than a few feeble wiggles anyway, would have put paid to any plans of getting up and out of here. He’d had to run from the O’Driscolls in his underwear, but even he had his limits. 

Plus a woman was sitting there calm as anything doing her sewing. He studied her face, and it looked familiar, as did the yellow plaid shawl draped over her shoulders. The pregnant Indian girl with Weathers, the Army deserter, or objector, or whatever the hell he’d been calling himself. “Mrs. Weathers.”

“My name is Red Shawl,” she corrected him. That voice--so she was the one there when he’d briefly surfaced before. “My husband no longer goes by his _wašícu_ name either. He’s Snow Goose.”

“All right then, Mrs.--Shawl?” Goddamn it, there was no way he was calling her _Mrs. Goose_. She eyed him with what had to be a trace of amusement at his discomfort, from the small quirk at one corner of her mouth, but she mercifully didn’t pull him up on it. Right, so, he was in Wapiti. Something about Sadie getting him here. “How long I been here?”

“You woke up for a moment two days ago. Then the fever took you again.” She studied him with a careful glance. “Much concern here for you, Mr. Morgan. Charles and Mrs. Adler have been here every moment they ain’t out hunting. Rains Fall himself has stopped in twice.”

“Hell, all that fuss over me?” Should have left him on the mountain, anyway. 

She kept sewing, calm as anything. “Shouldn’t there be? You seem a decent man.”

“Then you don’t much know me, ma’am.”

“You came to collect my husband’s debt. Seemed half-hearted about it. You fought the soldiers off, by his side. Then you saw me, and that our supplies were gone, and wouldn’t take no payment. Your partner must have been annoyed for you to return empty handed, but you did. I also saw you and Mr. Smith coming here with Eagle Flies last week to bring him back to his father to die among his people. You’re a very sick man but your fuss is for others. You have friends who care enough to fuss about you. You have the respect and concern of a chief.” She looked at him with a level, direct dark gaze. “So I seen plenty about you, sir. Words mean nothing, as my people have found, time and again, treaty after broken treaty. It’s acts that show us someone’s true spirit. And yours have been ones of honor.”

Goddamn it, he had that strange feeling like when talking to Sister Calderón, backed up against a cliff by a formidable sort of wisdom. Best to shut his mouth and not keep arguing, much as he couldn’t let those words settle easily on his shoulders. It was like an ill-fitting coat. 

But she wasn’t wrong about words. Dutch had plenty of words, twisted things around until black was white, and then went and did something else entirely. It was only when he’d stopped trusting the words, started looking at the actions, that he’d seen the light. “If you say so, Mrs. Shawl.” 

Hearing a soft gurgling noise, his eyes went to the bundle by her side. She’d had a huge belly when he’d seen her out near Three Sisters, and that was, what, three weeks ago now? “You’ve had your child, I see.”

She nodded, reaching over and picking up the baby, gently soothing it, that little smile all soft and alight rather than amused as she looked down at the tiny thing in her arms. “A son, yes. Nine days ago.” _A son._ Couldn’t help but think of Isaac, so tiny and so perfect, though the first time he’d seen the boy was when he was two months old, because when he’d been born they’d been in Utah and Eliza in Wyoming. Thought then of the celebration they’d all had in camp the night Abigail and John rode back with baby Jack after John hurried her into town when her labor started. “After our things was destroyed on the trail, Snow Goose and I came here to Wapiti. We had heard they might be moving north soon, and thought that might suit us to avoid the Army. Chief Rains Fall took us in.”

“Course he did.” That was the sort of man the chief was. The kind who’d take in an Army deserter-objector-whatever who was sick of being a ruthless jackass to the Indians and loved one instead. The kind who’d shelter an outlaw wanted in--well, however many states it was by now. The kind that Arthur Morgan not a year past would have mocked as the sort to take in any kind of hard luck case with a sad story and talk, talk, talk rather than act and fight back. The kind of man he wished like hell he could have been himself years past, rather than in some eleventh hour turn facing his own death. “Folk ain’t cleared out of here yet?”

“Most have. The ones left are those needing time to gather strength for the journey.” Yeah, heading north in November wasn’t going to be the easiest trip, but it wasn’t as though they had much choice. No more choice than the gang had in fleeing Blackwater back in May into the teeth of that howling gale up in the western Grizzlies.

“I should...should be heading out. Don’t want to cause no more trouble for Rains Fall.” He already had the Army sniffing around his doorstep, ready to close the jaws of that trap. Last thing he needed was the damn Pinkertons chasing after him. 

She raised an eyebrow, again with that half-smile of amusement. “That’s gonna have to wait. You can’t even stand right now, Mr. Morgan.”

“I can manage enough, even when I ain’t able to do more than crawl,” he said grimly, remembering tearing up his hands and arms and knees on the stone, more pinpricks of pain fading easily into the background of it all, but determined to get to that gun and kill Micah with it as the last damn thing he’d ever do. Because this couldn’t stand. No more. 

“You ain’t going nowhere, Arthur,” and there Sadie was, pushing her way through the tent flap, “even if I have to truss you up on Bob’s back again.”

“If I’m tied down on the horse’s back to travel but going nowhere, ain’t that a bit of a contradiction?” Couldn’t resist being a smartass, since that was about all he was capable of doing right now.

Standing there as she was, he couldn’t see it, but he could well imagine her rolling her eyes. “That smart mouth of yours recovered just fine, huh? Let’s see about getting the rest of you to come back.”

Red Shawl stood, gathering her sewing into her other hand, holding her son still in the crook on one arm. “Is Snow Goose back with you, Mrs. Adler?”

“Yeah, he and Charles are in the smokehouse putting up the catch.”

“Then I’ll leave you to it.” As she headed for the tent flap, Sadie smiled and nodded her thanks, sitting down on the wolfskin that Red Shawl had just vacated.

She eyed him up and down carefully. “Ain’t gonna ask how you’re feeling, because I can about figure your answer.”

“Still alive, for now at least. Sounds like I have you to thank for that.”

She waved a dismissive hand. “You’ve saved my life, I’ve saved yours. That’s how it goes, ain’t it?”

“I’m pretty sure riding back from Copperhead Landing all the way to Bluestone Ridge, dodging Pinkertons--woman, _what_ was you thinking? I asked you to--”

“What was I thinking?” Her tone got that clipped edge, like a knife sharpened to razor keenness, that told him that her blood was up. “John found us and said you was dead for sure, and he was fine to take care of Abigail, Jack, and Tilly from there. So I was thinking I’d come and bury you, Arthur, you brave damn fool.”

Of course she would. Of course if anyone would be a brave damn fool herself, and do all that just to try to see him planted proper in a hole in the ground, it would be Sadie Adler. “Well, guess I went and made a mess of dying--”

“Don’t you even joke about that!” she snapped, pushing up to her knees to loom over him, finger pointed right in his face, and he could see her hazel eyes, hard and shining with what might have been tears. “Don’t you even dare. Look at all of them as died already, and you wanna try to be funny about it?”

Trying to yell when his voice was nothing more than a hollow rasp felt about as pathetic as he was right now, and lying there so weak to boot, so he pushed himself up a bit more only with effort, feeling the robe slip from his shoulders. “You think I wouldn’t see any one of them alive again in trade for me?” Lenny, Sean, Hosea, even Kieran, certainly her husband Jake--any of them worth a dozen of him. How they could be gone and somehow, here he still was, felt like another great joke of the world. He loved and hated her in that moment for saving his life, because what was he supposed to do with the whole burden of that survival now when better folks hadn’t gotten that chance?

She calmed, sitting back down heavily, hands resting on her knees. He watched her, staying quiet, waiting for her to speak. The fire hit a knot of pitch in one of the logs with a cracking pop. Some of that wheat-blond hair straggled loose from her braid, falling in her eyes. She looked tired, and no wonder, if she’d ridden back to save him, got him to Wapiti, and probably been out ever since helping with the hunting and the like. “I remember Dutch saying things like that, and he could make you want to believe it, but it was more of his shit. You? Damn you, Arthur. Cause you say it and you mean it. But you tried to go and die for other folks, and it didn’t take. You’re here and they ain’t, so what are you gonna do about it? If you hate me for dragging you here so much, then you say the word. You want a pistol, I’ll give you one. I…” Her voice faltered, failed, and she looked away from him, down towards the fire.

He could take the pistol. He’d stood there on that mountaintop, and what little he had left in him to give seemed best fitted to buying John time. There had been a sense of relief to it too--yes, this was best. Going down to his death buying his friend, his brother, a chance to get away and make something new of his life away from all this wreckage. Finally, no more pain, no more suffering, no more doubt. It would be all over, in one last fine and noble act, and then there hopefully would finally be peace and rest.

Wasn’t going to be so simple as that, clearly. And God knew how much the TB could ravage him yet. Might leave him suffocating to death in his bed however long from now, unable to even speak. He could end it, while he had even a single shred of dignity--though even that was hard to see at this moment--and choose his way out still.

But he couldn’t help but think of Hamish, hobbling along so well on that fake leg, determined and cheerful and funny. Probably when Hamish woke up in the surgeon’s tent during the war, he could have got someone to slip him a gun too. Most folks would have understood the notion. Better death than living with the excruciating pain of the amputation and after, the risk of it going septic, and even if he survived all that, the guarantee of being left lame for the rest of his life, struggling for things that had once come with ease. Hamish chose to live, to not let that loss limit him more than it needed. He might have had a crippled body, but damn if the man hadn’t flat out refused to let it cripple his mind. 

Dying on the mountain for John’s sake, that would have been selfless. Taking the pistol now would be the coward’s path, giving up to fear and doubt and self-pity. Could be that the Pinkertons might catch him yet and hang him, because he was pretty sure they’d be willing to carry him up to the gallows if need be, but no use worrying about that. It wasn’t something he could control. 

So--he’d fight this. If fate or God or Sadie Adler’s stubbornness meant for him to have some more time, then he’d do what he could with it. Do some more good if he regained the strength for it. And probably the tuberculosis would win in the end, but he could face that calm enough now, because there wasn’t much left to fear anymore. “No. I ain’t gonna do that.” He gingerly reached out from under the buffalo robe, touching the back of her hand where it lay on her knee. She looked up at his face with a half-startled expression. “Thank you, Mrs. Adler.”

She surprised him, turned her palm over, grasping his fingers in hers tightly. He ought to let go, not hold on longer than was proper, but she didn’t let go and he didn’t much want to either. Maybe the both of them needed something to cling to then, because right now he felt as lost and bewildered as he had washed up on that Guarma beach. “Why ain’t you almost never called me ‘Sadie’?” she asked. “Every other woman in that camp, you called mostly by her name. Karen. Mary-Beth. Abigail. Tilly. Molly. Hell, you would call Grimshaw ‘Susan’ from time to time. But not me.” 

He tried to put it all together in his tired and still-scattered mind, exactly how to explain it. “It was...Karen, them all, they’d been there for years. You’d joined up with us so recent, and wasn’t till Rhodes at least that we knew you wasn’t just biding your time, that you meant to stick with us. Would have been presumptuous, I guess, bein’ so familiar so quickly, especially us men. You know what folks would assume from that.” All those men calling her by her first name off such short acquaintance, people would think she was anybody’s. They’d given her the armor of her respectability, her widowhood, to help prop her up. 

Just the same as they called Susan “Miss Grimshaw” for the respect of it. Arthur, Hosea, and Dutch were the only ones allowed otherwise due to how long that association went back, and even they didn’t exercise that right all the time. She’d been sharp and no-nonsense, but she’d been kind to him too, all those years, had a soft spot for him. She hadn’t been sharing Dutch’s bed since Arthur was seventeen, but she had been Dutch’s woman, more or less his wife, all the same when it came to running the camp, and everyone knew it. No wonder it finally drove Molly crazy enough to make such a desperate play for his attention, to make herself matter as more than the boss-man’s latest plaything, to be used up and discarded. Jesus, the poor girl. How many had there been? Susan had been the wife turning a pointedly blind eye as Dutch ran around with a string of mistresses. First Rachel, then Naomi, Wanda, poor Annabelle, Libby, Veronica...a whole long string of them, for a couple of years at most until they got fed up and left, died, got arrested, or Dutch paid them off for a child he’d got on them. They’d all chuckled at it--yeah, Dutch like the ladies, and the ladies liked Dutch. It all felt sordid and sad now to look back on it with clearer eyes. 

Susan in the camp, Arthur out in the wilds: Dutch’s two hands, they’d been, his most dedicated enforcers, so fiercely loyal above anything. Maybe in coming to stand with him as she had in Beaver Hollow before Micah shot her down like a dog, she had seen the truth herself of how badly she’d been used. She must have, for her deep faith to finally and completely break like that.

He wondered what had been going through Dutch’s mind in that moment. The near-wife, the two men he’d taken in as boys and pointedly called his sons so many times, all together moving to stand against him. Obviously none of it sunk in. He’d had one more chance on Bluestone Ridge to make even some small part of it right, and he’d simply walked away.

Sadie closed those hazel eyes for a moment, but strangely enough, still kept hold of his hand. “Not always easy, hearing ‘Mrs. Adler’ all the time. Not when them O’Driscolls made sure that’s a thing I ain’t anymore.”

“I’m so--” Shit. He hadn’t thought of that, all that time he’d been saying it, believing himself kind and courteous and instead he’d been twisting the knife all along. 

She shook her head to cut him off, obviously not wanting the pity. She opened her eyes, and gave him a sly little smile. “Besides, you want to talk about getting familiar, Charles and I got them wet clothes off you when I got you here. I’ve seen you naked as a jaybird now, Arthur Morgan. So don’t you ‘Mrs. Adler’ me no more.” 

He felt the heat flaring to life in his cheeks at that. _Half-dead, skinny as a rail, filthy as a beggar, and beat all to hell. Not_ , he reflected ruefully, _exactly the way any fella fancies a woman seeing him out of his clothes._ Not that there was anything between them, but it was an awkwardness all the same. But like her teasing, his own mental quip about helped ease the whole thing off and make it bearable.

“Don’t you worry none about corrupting me,” she went on, that mischievous smile growing even wider, obviously enjoying getting one in over him, “I’ve been to bed with a man, you know. Got nothing in your pants I ain’t seen the likes of before.”

He wasn’t sure whether he wanted to laugh, which would hurt like hell, or just try to die from sheer embarrassment. Bit of both, perhaps. “Well, that’s...real reassuring. Got me all worried about your virtue for a moment there, delicate flower as you are and all.” Took in as deep a breath as he could manage without it sending him down into a spiral of coughing. “All right, then, have it your way, _princess_.” He couldn’t resist throwing one right back at her, right before he got serious. “Sadie it is.” He looked up into her face as he said it, met her eyes with his.

She looked back at him, giving a small nod of gratitude. Settled herself back down, squeezing his hand one last time and letting it go. A part of him wished she hadn’t. “You wanna tell me what happened up on the mountain, and I tell you what happened after?”

It didn’t take but a moment of thought on that. “Seems a fair trade.” Awkwardly, he managed to roll over onto his side, growing weary of keeping himself propped up. Told her about riding back to the Hollow, confronting Dutch, Micah killing Susan, then the desperate flight with John up to the top of the ridge. The fight with Micah, and some things he struggled so damn hard to say. “Tried as hard as I could,” he said tiredly, exhausted with so much talking. “I tried, but I couldn’t take him down. Just not enough left in me. And Dutch...he was there, looking down at me, and I begged him. One last time. He just...left. Walked away from Micah at least, but...” _I gave you all I had. I did._ And everything hadn’t ever been enough.

“Dutch needed to put a bullet in Micah’s skull, not walk away. I swear to Jesus if I ever see him again, that’s gonna happen,” she said grimly, mouth set into a tight line of rage. “Might put one in Dutch’s skull while I’m at it. Leaving John to die, leaving you to die. His two sons, he was always bragging!”

He couldn’t touch the thought of Dutch just yet to decide whether to condemn him. Enough pain in him already, mind and body both, without prodding and digging up more just yet. “A bullet or the rope, don’t matter much how, but no arguing that Micah needs killing.” Micah was a lot simpler. The thought that Micah was still out there, wreaking havoc and getting more people killed with his insanity, gnawed at him. He’d failed to kill the man, and so the damn rat would go to ground now, find some hole to hide away in, as rats always did, spreading plague where he went, not caring what devastation he left behind him. “But he’s smart enough we ain’t finding him for a while. And there’s been enough killing and dying for a little while, don’t you think?” After all, she had come back for him, or his body at least, not to finish any business with Dutch or Micah or anyone.

“You might be right about that.”

“How many Pinkertons did you have to leave dead on the road anyway?” She’d brought some heat down on herself for Van Horn, like as not, and if she’d turned that up for his sake, that made it even worse. “Damn it, Sadie, why the hell you think I told you to go? Wasn’t just to look after Tilly, Abigail, and the boy. I wanted you away from all this!” Before it destroyed what was left of her, while there was still something good and true in her that she could save, coax back to life, with the O’Driscolls finally broken and hunted down.

She eyed him coolly, not bothered by his irritation. Probably didn’t help a hint of anger from a man who couldn’t even stand up right then wasn’t all that much of a threat. “None, actually. Two of ‘em stopped me near O’Creagh’s Run, but I had you wrapped up on Bob’s back. Trying to keep you warm, making you look like a body besides. Said you was a dead Murfree bounty I was bringing in. Talked my way past them, and made my way here.”

She’d managed all that? One hell of a woman. But hearing she’d gotten away without causing more mayhem on his account eased something inside him. The tent flap opened then and Charles came in through, carrying what looked like a couple of bowls of stew. “Played my role as a dead body that well, did I?”

Charles answered, tone dry as bone, “I saw you when you got here. You could have fooled most anyone that you was dead. Fooled the Pinkertons too, it seems.”

“The morons as stopped me said another pair of Pinkertons had seen you was dead and put a claim towards the bounty on you already,” Sadie said. “Didn’t look close enough, obviously.”

“Ah, so I’m confirmed dead for sure? Ain’t that nice.” Even as he joked about it, that opened a strange possibility. If they thought he was dead, claimed the bounty on his supposedly dead self, they’d stop looking. Was it really that easy? Another chance, handed over like a Christmas gift? All Dutch’s raving about Tahiti or Australia or New York, that need for one last big heist, and all it took to escape was nearly dying and a couple of lazy Pinkertons not checking him close enough and writing him off as dead, in a hurry to score their own big payday. _Seems the promise of a whole lot of money makes damn idiots of us all._

Charles sat down beside Sadie, giving him a nod of greeting. “It’s good to see you awake, Arthur.”

“Been a while, by the sound of it.” He managed to push himself most of the way up to sitting, and let Charles shove a sack behind him for him to lean against to prop himself up enough to eat. Sagging back against that sack of flour, he steadied himself for a minute before doing anything else, heart beating faster even from that small bit of effort.

The stew was hot, and compared to the usual greasy mess in camp, actually tasted pretty good. Forced himself to eat slowly, breathe slowly, even as his empty stomach came to life with a fury, and he wanted to inhale the whole bowl of it. If he ended up choking, that would be another round of Godawful, agonizing coughing, so best not. So that left him savor it a bit. The vegetables--turnips and carrots, he thought--still had a little bite left to them, though honestly he preferred that to Pearson’s cooking them down to a mush. He suspected some of the meat might be horse, though he wouldn’t ask. He’d had to eat horse a time or two when things got lean, including the gang butchering poor Boudicca on the road up to the Grizzlies when she broke her leg in a gopher hole not too far outside of Strawberry. Tried to not think of Zenobia either, and how she’d died on Bluestone Ridge, whinnying in pain and fear. Faithful to the end, both of them, and they’d died too because of the mad, violent life he’d been living. At least he’d been able to give both of them a last moment of comfort, one last bit of praise. It seemed little enough given all they’d carried him through.

All of them sat there, spooning up their stew, and it was the companionable kind of silence of those who’d been together enough, been through enough, that there was no need to fill things with idle chatter. There had been so much talk these last months, and much of it empty bluster anyway. But all the same, Charles finally spoke up. “I suppose tomorrow I ought to get around to burying you. They’re gonna assume someone stole the body in the night--”

“You’re welcome,” Sadie said with a self-satisfied smile.

“But if there’s a grave and a marker, well, that’ll help sell the story that you died up there on the mountain.”

It was on the tip of his tongue to make some lighthearted joke about Charles making sure he got a half-dozen pretty girls to cry over his grave, but it died before he spoke it. They’d buried enough people over the last few months. Thought of Lenny and Hosea, buried side by side just outside of St. Denis, and Sadie had seen to that. She hadn’t heard that conversation in camp one day, but he had to think maybe Tilly had told her. Probably told her too that fancy of his about being buried facing to the west when she’d said she was going back for him. Lord, the woman was fearless. John got there in time to meet them at Copperhead Landing, take over protecting the women and Jack, so of course she would have felt free to go back for his body. The woman had damn well sneaked into the St. Denis morgue for Lenny and Hosea. She wouldn’t balk at searching a mountain after dark to steal him from under the noses of the Pinkertons, and when she found him clinging to the last few threads of life, she’d hauled him on her horse and brought him to the one place he could be safe for a little while, long enough to hopefully be able to ride again. He nodded in acknowledgment instead. “Sounds about right.” 

He scraped up the last spoonful of stew. Not sure how to ask given Charles was taking on enough risk with this whole fake-grave business, but he had to anyhow. She’d been one of them. She’d been family. “Susan’s dead too. Micah shot her down at camp right before the Pinkertons came down on the place. Could you--would you--please.” The last victim of the whole piece of madness, and he knew full well Susan hadn’t been to everyone’s tastes now, but so few of them had known her when she was young and happy and in love, and laughed a hell of a lot more. Just one more life Dutch had snared and ruined and then finally sacrificed. 

“I found her down at camp. Left her wrapped up so the animals won’t get to her,” Sadie said, voice going oddly gentle. “Planned to bury her after you, but, well, some plans got changed when you wasn’t quite dead.”

“Of course,” Charles said, not even hesitating. “Is there any place she’d like?”

He had to think about it, trying hard to recall if she’d said anything at all in the twenty-odd years he’d known her. “She never did say anything special about how she’d like to be buried. But usually when she’d go be alone, you’d find her someplace quiet, nice view. Saying as she needed to get away from all our bickering and bullshit for a little while, and appreciate something pretty.” 

“It’ll be handled,” Charles said. “It’s good to see you awake and eating, but it’ll be a few days yet before you’re up.” He set down his empty stew bowl beside him, and reached into the satchel slung at his side. Pulled out two leather-bound books, and handed them over. “Figured you could use these while you rest.”

He read the gilt lettering on the spine of the navy blue one: "Oliver Twist". Well, something he hadn't read before. “Mr. Dickens, huh? I was a bit of a ways into A Tale of Two Cities' before it all went crazy in Blackwater.” Never did get back to it. There had been so much to do all the time keeping the camp up and running, and then running away again, over and over, and there wasn’t a moment to spare to sit down and read for the sheer pleasure of it. _Except Dutch sure was sitting around reading a lot, as usual. Hosea too, but Hosea was sick, nobody could blame him for taking it easy. And he was still out running jobs._ Putting it aside, he turned to the other one, black leather, opened it to see blank pages. 

He looked up at Charles. “It was a blank book an Army quartermaster had for his accounts and left here. Don’t think we didn’t all see you scribbling away in that journal of yours,” he said, a glint of humor in his eyes. "Looks like you lost your last one.”

He shook his head. “John’s got it now, I guess.”

“All this time, all we done together, it’s _Johnny Marston_ as gets a peek at that notorious journal of yours?” Sadie joked. “That’s some gratitude for you!”

“I wasn’t much worrying about him reading it when I was gonna be dead, you know,” he protested, rolling his eyes. “I just handed my whole bag over when I sent him off. Money, everything I had except my guns and some bullets. He was gonna need it. I wasn’t.”

Well, never mind it. He’d never see John again for it to be a source of awkwardness of the man reading Arthur’s private thoughts, including dragging one John Fucking Idiot Marston over the coals repeatedly. Good thing it was that particular journal. The previous one he’d lost in the fire had been far unkinder, given he’d been writing that while John decided to vanish on Abigail and Jack for a whole damn year, then suddenly reappear. Not to mention he’d been far more of a harsh, cold jackass himself when writing that thing.

“I’ve got some money,” Sadie said. “What you gave to Tilly before you sent her and Jack away. Plus what I’ve got.” She looked over at Charles. “How are you fixed?”

“I don’t need much. I’ll be going to Canada with Rains Fall.”

“You should take some of it,” Sadie said, shaking her head. “You wasn’t there on that train job, no, but that only makes you smart. You’re one of us, Charles. You should take what you can, so you have it.”

“I’ve got my share laid by already. So you be quiet and keep the money. You’ll need it if you’re heading to Mexico and he can’t work for a long while,” Charles argued right back.

Feeling like he was being talked right past, he had to interrupt. “Wait, Mexico?”

“Would you prefer Tahiti?” Sadie asked him sarcastically.

If he never heard the Goddamn word _Tahiti_ again in his life, he could die a happy man, whenever that might be. “Got my fill of tropical islands on Guarma, thanks very much. I go unconscious for a few days and wake up to there being some kind of plan, so how about you catch a fella up here?”

“I’m taking you to Mexico.”

“Ah, so it’s gonna be tequila, banditos, and pretty senoritas?”

“It’s gonna be hot dry climate,” she said, pinning him with that sharp hawklike gaze of hers. “Lots of rest. Over the American border besides. All of them things are just what you need right now.”

“Sadie…” So what, now she meant to escort his sorry self south, and then stick by him? It wasn’t like he’d be up and around in five days and things would be just dandy after that. “Heard enough about TB back when we was running around Colorado and Wyoming, years back, since some folks had gone there to try to recover. A man’s got gambler’s odds at best to survive it. If you do, takes months, years sometimes until you’re well again. You really wanna come play nursemaid for that long?” He shook his head, incredulous. No chance she could want that. There might be some folks worth all the fuss and bother, but not him.

“My social engagement book ain’t exactly full, Arthur.”

He couldn’t resist pushing it. “I’m bad off. You wanna bury me, for real this time, if it don’t work out? I ain’t in the mood to be a chain around your neck. Better you get clear of it all.”

“Well, you ain’t going anywhere by yourself, that much is for damn sure. And don’t think we wasn’t all seeing you burning yourself to the wick taking care of us all spring and summer long, then after you got sick, going even harder trying to give us a chance for something past all that. Me even, with taking care of that business at Hanging Dog. Now? It’s your turn to be looked after. You need some caring for, and I ain’t got anywhere to go, no plans myself, so this gives me something worth my while to do while I figure things out. I ain’t too proud to admit that. So shut up and let me help you, or are you gonna let your pride kill you?”

He’d urged too many people lately to not die for the sake of pride, that it had killed too many folks. Edith Downes had listened, for which he’d been grateful beyond words. He could do with taking his own advice. “All right. I ain’t too proud to admit you’re talking some sense. So Mexico it is.” 

Maybe Dutch and Bill and Javier hadn’t been worth it in the end. But John had his back, and what higher priorities he’d had were ones Arthur could understand. He was thinking of his family, not his own skin. Here, Sadie and Charles, he had two people who still did have his back, who hadn’t written him off as dying, useless, crazy. Looking at them, he couldn’t help but say, “Thank you.” He’d have to do his best to live up to that faith.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Journal Entry**

They say cats have nine lives, but I ain’t all that sure how many a man is supposed to have. I owe my life not to my own efforts but to ~~Mrs. Adler~~ Sadie and Charles, them as care enough to save my life and look after me until I can travel.

At that point I will head south for Mexico and see what can be done about me getting better. I expect a tough fight with long odds but that ain't nothing new in this life. Charles will head north to Canada with the Wapiti as he should, but Sadie has said she’s coming with me so it looks like we shall be two castaways sticking together after the whole damn MESS of the shipwreck that was the old gang. 

Plenty of women of late are proving to me just how little I know about things and myself and both Sadie and Mrs. Red Shawl are no exception to that. The latter gave birth to her boy in this camp. Army still wants to hang or shoot her husband, I suppose, so I hope they find something better up north. Living among people the government wants to hound, that’s a familiar feeling.

Sadie said John found his family and they will be OK. I don’t regret what I tried to do for John. That was the best thing I've done in probably a long time. The regrets I do have? That I didn’t see through Dutch much sooner, and I could not finish off Micah. He’ll be back to cause more trouble someday, get more folks killed. Pure chaos and hate and violence. A man like that ain’t the sort to live a quiet life. Maybe I will still be around when that rat sniffs his way back into daylight and I can finish it then and make up for my failure this time. We shall see. Until then, no point courting trouble. 

There’s a great deal to think about now that I have some more time left to me and not much to do but rest up. This whole crazy year, and all the years running with Dutch. My whole life till now, and where I want that life to go from here. Tired as I am, that’s too much for my mind just now.

( **Sketch of Red Shawl holding her son** , captioned “MRS. RED SHAWL AND SHAWL JUNIOR”)


	3. Wapiti: Goodbye and Good Luck

She left Wapiti with dawn peeping over the eastern horizon, gleams of gold off the damp stone. Down from the mountains, over the Dakota and well into the rolling hills of the Cumberland Forest by the time the sun fully came up. Her job today was to get to Valentine, and get some supplies there. Everyone on the reservation was packing things in--soon they’d move out. Charles and the Wapiti headed north to Canada, her and Arthur headed south to Mexico. Seemed to say something that all of them were getting the hell out of America at this point, and it wasn’t just about the government having a keen interest in them.

Another four days had done Arthur a lot of good. Borrowed some of Charles’ clean clothes, gotten out of bed, moved around the camp, helped people with a few small tasks. The toll of the disease and the last few months had finally caught up with him, though. He still got tired easily, and usually after that he’d go roll up in that bison robe, and sleep like the--well, like a man exhausted.

When she’d last seen him, he’d been left minding Red Shawl’s son while she and her husband packed their stuff, making a face and grumbling that his life had come to him being a nursemaid, but without much irritation behind it. She’d seen a soft shine in those eyes of his as he looked at the boy, heard him muttering something lowly in that tone of voice people used with babies, as she swung up into the saddle. He couldn’t fool her. Hadn’t since she’d seen him at Colter, trying in that awkward, courteous way of his to check in on all the women and Jack besides. He could be a ruthless bastard when he needed, and she was thankful for that too, but there was that part of him too soft as a cloud. 

He’d be all right. If he tried to do something stupid and push too hard, she had every faith Charles would tell him to sit his ass back down, and would enforce that if need be.

Valentine was a fairly easy ride, and she didn’t push Bob too hard besides. She needed him to have some reserves for the journey back, given he’d be loaded with some things. Wasn’t like she could get the Wapiti a whole winters’ supply of provisions, not without driving a wagon up there, and that would attract too much notice. Besides, they wanted to move quick and light. The ones leaving now were the ones who most needed to get north and settled fast, because they were the frailer ones, with less time to spare on a journey in November weather.

So it would be essentials only for them. Medicine and ammunition most of all, the critical things the Army had kept back from them, the things that would let them heal and let them hunt when they made their way to their new home.

The Wapiti had some money laid by, so that hadn’t been the problem. The problem was that they couldn’t as easily ride in Valentine, St. Denis, or anywhere else, and buy the things they needed. One look at them, and suddenly an Indian’s money wasn’t much good, assuming they could even make it to the shops without being harassed. 

Sitting together yesterday, helping mend a jacket for Six Bear Killer, one of the elderly men, Red Shawl had bitterly complained that when she’d tried to buy some ginger-root for her nausea, a shopkeeper out in Tall Trees had stared her down and told her that if she’d gone through her allotment from the Indian Bureau, that wasn’t much his problem. “What allotment? My people hadn’t seen an allotment in six months. He said that his supplies was for settlers as truly needed them, not greedy Indians looking for more than their share.” She flung up her hands. “Snow Goose walks into the same shop fifteen minutes later and buys it, nothing said!”

Sadie didn’t doubt that for a moment. They both knew exactly why that had been--her husband, with his white skin and that Weathers name that he could still claim as a shield when it served his family, wouldn’t get a second look.

She’d already had to go to Valentine for supplies for herself and Arthur, so she might as well put her own white skin to some good use in this case. The Wapiti had gotten screwed for sure by the government, and they’d been good enough to shelter Arthur while he got back on his feet, even if barely. Maybe she hadn’t been a full-fledged outlaw or anything like that before O’Driscolls and their violence came into her life, but there was a reason she and Jake had decided to go way up into the Grizzlies as they had, to live near nobody and nothing. Even Colter had been abandoned for a good five years by the time they built their home in Pinetree Gorge.

They’d both grown up near Tumbleweed, and in her life it had turned from a rough-and-tumble boomtown to something half-civilized, half-savage as the government came in with laws and structure and whatever else. Then they forced themselves into Tumbleweed’s fate again, made the decision to route the rails through Armadillo that began slowly killing off the place. One arbitrary decision, and in the time she went from girl to woman, what had been a happy and thriving town became a mere shadow of itself, all dust and dying dreams and despair.

Her parents had moved from the east to escape all that shit, make something new away from a life becoming more and more highly regimented and controlled. So much as she and Jake had hated to leave, feeling like they were giving up, there was nothing they could fight for on it. They’d have been as destroyed as the Wapiti. She was twenty-eight already and he was thirty-three and they’d done everything they could to keep their parents’ dreams and their land afloat, and all it got them was more of a struggle, more debt, more waiting to be married. Going north, way up away from it all, and hoping it took a full damn generation or more for all that overbearing control to catch up to them there, sounded like a pretty good idea. Given up on their parents' dreams in favor of their own, packed their trunks, and they’d headed for Blackwater to be married.

They’d had such plans, her and Jake. Making that homestead, living a quiet life on their own terms away from the vagaries and whims of whatever fools in Washington who hadn’t the first clue about how things worked out here, and how people lived or died on the ignorant stroke of a pen. Wanted to raise their kids to think for themselves, have choices, but they’d put having them off a while a few years until the homestead got more established. That never would happen now, of course, the ranch settling down or the babies. So it had been just the two of them. They’d hunted, fished, ranched a bit. Grew used to the rhythms of the seasons, so very different from the sunbaked red rocks of western New Austin. They’d both been all childish wonderment at the snow. After that first blizzard, after digging a path to the barn to feed the horses, she’d stuffed snow down Jake’s collar, and he’d repaid the favor by throwing her over his shoulder and dumping her in a snowdrift. They’d hurried inside after that to warm up by the fire and then stayed in bed for most of the next three days, keeping each other warm in the best way they knew how, venturing out only to feed and water the horses. There had been some dangerous types around, and she'd been on edge and ready to shoot if she had to, but it wasn't the same as it had been living the outlaw life. Having to kill was one thing, and Jake had struggled even with the notion of that, wanting to find ways short of that to solve things. She hadn’t imagined that she could even feel a fierce satisfaction in killing, given the right rage and circumstances. 

Now here she was, down from the mountains that she thought she’d die in--first peacefully and then in terror--leaving that dream behind her in ashes both literal and figurative. Running south, just as she’d run north three years ago, her and a man hoping to make some kind of quiet life away from the scrutiny, away from it all. Though it wasn’t like that with her and Arthur, even as fine a man as he was. Relieved her beyond words that he’d never had expectations, that after she’d called out his crap that day they went on the supply run to Rhodes, he’d treated her with respect, and he’d never assumed a widow naturally wanted her blankets kept warm with a man in them. Couldn’t say the same about Micah. 

Though to hear the girls in camp, Arthur didn’t bother them either, treating them with the courtesy like they were his little sisters. Whatever creaking the bed frame the man did, it was apparently in town. Too bad for Tilly and Mary-Beth, given she’d seen the way they looked at him sometimes, though Mary-Beth less so once she’d struck up a thing with Kieran. But she’d been that young once. Arthur, thirty-five or so, fine-looking, and Dutch’s chief enforcer? Might as well be locoweed to a young thing around twenty or so. She knew what it was like being smitten with a man old enough to wear some mantle of power and wear it easily, the sort that seemed wise and strong and experienced and just dangerous enough in a way that melted a gal’s heart and other parts besides, old enough for youthful prettiness to have yielded to a rugged handsomeness, but not near so old as to be revolting. Next to that, boys her own age had felt so callow and dumb. She’d been all moony over a gunslinger before she saw sense and saw the fineness in Jake there right in front of her, though a dozen or more years on now, she couldn’t even recall his name, just his magnificent mustache and flashing silver-chased pistols.

She hadn’t been through Valentine that much, given she had kept to herself and stayed in the camp while they stayed at Horseshoe Overlook, and then they were east, first to the south and then to the north, and she’d go instead to Rhodes, St. Denis, Van Horn, or Annesburg. She’d passed through some while hunting down O’Driscoll trash, but unlike the boys with their mayhem of various types, fistfights and drunk shenanigans and bank robbery and a gunfight with Cornwall’s men--no Goddamn wonder the Pinkertons found them--she’d left little to no impression on this town, which served her well now. Sometimes in life it paid to be invisible, as any woman knew all too well.

The streets were as pokey and muddy as ever, and she hitched up first at the gunsmith, bought her fair share of rifle ammunition. “Homesteader?” he guessed, looking at her practical shirt and pants and kerchief. 

She nodded her acknowledgment. “Up in the Grizzlies. The husband and me want to get that last bit of hunting in before the snowfall, and then like as not we’ll be snowed in for the winter besides.” Easy to draw on memories for that to speak with confidence, though she and Jake had done their stocking up in Strawberry, not Valentine. Best to not talk too much, leave too many memories by being something remarkable. Humdrum sodbusters would be a dime a dozen to any shopkeeper.

General store next, buying some clothes for herself, and some for Arthur besides. Hoped she got the size estimation right--he was a bigger man than Jake, at least he was when he wasn’t a skinny scarecrow shadow of himself. Bought some books too, gave the same excuse: homesteading, preparing for the winter. It all felt like being thrown back in time a year, like she really _was_ there in town buying the things for enduring the long, boring winter up in Pinetree Gulch. Books. Clothes. Ammunition. Medicine. No kerosene, coffee, or the like, though.

Good thing she wasn’t in Strawberry, because if Chip, with his half-moon spectacles and his not-so-secret still making excellent white lightning in his basement, had been there, it might have been too much. He knew her and Jake, these past years. She could imagine him smiling at her and calling her _Mrs. Adler_ , asking what she needed this time, assuming she was buying those things for Jake, recommending the latest books he’d gotten in. Had she been there and he’d done that, she might well have fallen apart. 

Might have also felt that sick angry unease from that Goddamn beard of his, because after that bastard Tom Watkins--she'd heard one of the others say his name, and that fixed it in her mind forever--dark-haired and bearded men sometimes tended to stoke both her terror and her rage. Bill Williamson did a fine enough job making a fool of himself by anyone’s lights, but her temper with him had been short enough to begin thanks to that stupid fur on his face. He’d soon learned to give her a wide berth.

Blinking that away only with effort, she tried ruthlessly to focus herself in the present. Looking at the stack of a half-dozen novels, she asked, “Do you have ‘A Tale Of Two Cities’ by Mr. Dickens?” She remembering Arthur saying to Charles he’d got only part way into it and then things went wrong in Blackwater, and he sure as hell hadn’t had idle time to read since then. Might enjoy getting a chance to finish it, and she’d never read that one herself.

He nodded, adding a red-bound book to the stack. She paid up, having him hold the stuff until she was ready to leave, given it was growing to be a considerable bundle. Good thing she’d have that proud bastard of a horse of Arthur’s to bear some of the burden on the way back.

At her next stop, things got strange. The doctor was oddly nervous, glancing towards the door of the shop. “I don’t want no more trouble,” he protested.

She shook her head, not understanding. “What in hell are you talking about?”

“I saw you come through town a few weeks back with that big fella. Look, those O’Driscolls threatened me into running that crap from my back room, all right? He actually did me a real favor clearing them out. But they were the high rollers. What, did he send you to finish the job, see what you can get--what is it, four _months_ later? I’ve got ten bucks in the register right now, lady. Nothing more. And I’ve got kids to feed.”

She shook her head, exasperated. “I ain’t here to rob you, idiot.” Shit. Well, obviously Arthur had left quite the impression, though hearing he’d sent a few more O’Driscolls to hell still satisfied, in a way. But it was a dull echo of the savage pleasure it had once been. They’d broken the gang, all of them were dead or fled, and about the only consolation was knowing they wouldn’t make any more widows or orphans. What they’d taken from her couldn’t be stolen back, no matter how much blood she spilled. _Revenge is a idiot’s game,_ he’d insisted. Maybe he hadn’t been wrong. But she still wasn’t sorry they were dead.

He eyed her, shoulders visibly relaxing from where he’d been strung tense as piano wire. “I read in the papers he’s dead. Pinkertons got him.”

“That so?” She’d have to buy that paper before leaving town and confirm that. “I left all that after him and me went out riding that day. Found out lots that he kept from me, mister. Found out who and what he really was, that miserable lying bastard.” How the hell to explain the need for all that medicine, though? She thought fast. “He gave me a souvenir, unfortunately.”

“Ma’am, I ain’t dealing in that kind of drug--”

With a sour amusement she realized he’d assumed the “souvenir” was Arthur leaving her pregnant, and that she was looking to get rid of it. Most women didn’t go to doctors on that. They’d go to other women. It was Grimshaw, of all people, who’d slipped her the right herbs at Horseshoe Overlook, told her that if there was any _complication_ after her ordeal with the O’Driscoll boys, that particular tea would make sure said problem got rooted out. She hadn’t liked the woman all that much, but that had been a kindness. “I ain’t knocked up. No, from the cough I’ve got, the blood, he left me with his damn TB.” She saw him instinctively take a half-step back. “Jesus, I wasn’t gonna cough on you.”

Something in him steadied again, and now his gaze turned sympathetic, almost kindly. “I’m afraid there ain’t that much I can do for you. Tuberculosis is--well, doctors always hate to lose a battle, but--that’s one damn mean enemy.”

Yeah, she didn’t need to hear that much either, and start to worry about Arthur’s odds. She couldn’t deny they were bad enough. “I’m heading south. I have cousins down New Austin way.” She lied, because if he talked to anyone, best they not know she and Arthur had gone to Mexico. “That gonna help?”

He leaned on the counter. “It should. Cholla Springs, Rio Bravo, thereabouts. Hot, dry weather. Lots of rest.” Nothing she didn’t know already. “Eating a lot. You haven’t lost much weight, I see, but...chances are it’ll come.” No, she’d dropped some weight these past months, but that was from how hard she’d gone to keep everything stitched together as best she could. “You can take laudanum for the pain, of course.”

“Gimme a couple bottles of it, then.” She rattled off the rest of the list for the Wapiti, staring at him, daring him to tell her it was ridiculous and wouldn’t help. But apparently he wasn’t going to disillusion a supposedly-dying woman from throwing everything at it and hoping something stuck. Probably didn’t hurt he’d make some good money off this transaction too.

He filled the order, carefully wrapping the bottles in cloth to keep them from jostling and breaking each other on the journey. From the price he quoted, he only charged her about half. “You and that Morgan fella parted ways on bad terms, and guess he was a bit of a bastard towards you. But I owe him something and it seems he’s put you in a bad way, so call this my thanks.”

“Sure.” She hoisted the bag over her shoulder, and headed out, down the street to the stable. Five minutes later, leading a sulky Buell to hitch him beside Bob at the general store, she eyed the big stallion, trying to feel out whether she was in for a tantrum or test from him. He eyed her right back with an imperious glare. So it was like that. Well, she’d show him who was boss and not back down, or he’d play up the whole way to Wapiti. “Behave or I’ll turn you into glue, you grumpy bastard,” she told him. “Tell Arthur you died a tragic victim of your own stubbornness. Which almost was the case with him, come to think of it, so ain’t you two a pretty pair.”

He snorted and flicked his ears at that. She sighed, holding out a carrot, and he carefully reached out and lipped it out of her hand. “Yeah, all right. Your old friend died, Arthur says, and leaves you to him, and then he goes and leaves you here to go riding off with a pretty female. Typical of a man, huh? Tell you the truth, I’d be a bit sore too.” She reached into her saddlebag for a sugar lump, and he reached for it more readily than he had the carrot. She ended up patting his neck, feeling him ease fractionally beneath her hand. “Trust me, boy, you was better off here. Zenobia went with him right to the end, and she ain’t coming back.” 

She would have gone with him too, had he let her, but given he’d intended that as a suicide mission, she could admit she’d been needed more at Copperhead Landing, at least until they’d known John had survived. Though she’d resented him a time or two during that long night for not letting her die a decent death fighting before _she_ got much worse from the dark growing inside of her, because wasn’t she entitled to that too? But it seemed it had worked out as it ought. If she’d gone with him to the Hollow and beyond, maybe she would have died there, and he would have died too.

The two of them came to terms, at least enough that Buell followed Bob readily enough. She didn’t stop to eat--there were biscuits and a chocolate bar in her satchel and that would tide her over well enough. One last stop at the train station, and she tied both the horses and headed inside. She would have much preferred to buy tickets up at Bacchus Station, away from all this other business in Valentine, and a shorter ride for Arthur from Wapiti besides, but Dutch’s infinite wisdom in blowing Bacchus Bridge a couple weeks back meant that train route was temporarily messed up on heading back westward, to put it lightly. Unless they wanted to go east from Bacchus through Annesburg and St. Denis, which sounded like a particularly choice piece of stupidity and altogether tempting fate a little too much, they’d have to catch the train from Valentine instead, and head west. 

Asked the agent about tickets, playing the dumb yokel who’d never ridden a train or robbed one either, trying to shave the edges off her west New Austin accent so her ignorance would pass. “My husband’s brother, he’s a bastard and don’t want us on the homestead now that their daddy’s dead. One of ‘em’s gonna kill the other if we don’t get the hell out of there, so we was thinking to go real far south. Make a new start. How far does the rail line go beyond Blackwater? What options we got?”

“Well, ma’am, trouble is, that’s a couple different rail lines, see? You’ll have to buy tickets for the next leg of your trip at each changeover point. And it’s not continuous either, sadly. Hopefully will be someday, but that don’t help you today, I’m aware. You’ll still have to stop at Riggs Station, either ride into Strawberry from there to take a coach a couple hours south to Blackwater, or if you and your husband are bringing your horses, you could just ride it yourself.” She’d known full well about the different rail lines, but that pointed reminder about Riggs Station plucked at her nerves. Outstanding. She’d run into that discontinuity herself when northward bound three years ago. She and Jake had taken a wagon from Blackwater onward since the train could take them no further directly, and it was easier to drive from that point all the way up to the Grizzlies given the things they had with them, and with their planning to collect more along the way even further north. 

It was a risk, changing over from their horses or a stagecoach to a train out in the open in the town where they’d likely shoot Arthur on sight, if they recognized him as being at least halfway alive still rather than dead as the newspapers claimed. But it was a risk they’d have to take. He pulled out the railway map, unfolding it on the counter, tracing the routes with his finger. “We here are the Central Union line. You take us to Riggs Station, and you get yourself to Blackwater from there. From Blackwater, you take the Union Pacific to the next junction at MacFarlane’s Ranch. From there, you can change over again to the Southwestern, and that’ll take you west into New Austin, or down into Mexico at Manteca Falls, if that’s where the wind takes you.”

“Thanks, friend. I’ll get the tickets to Riggs Station, at least. What times you got late tonight or early tomorrow? Got my man meeting me here tonight. Best to be done with it and get out of town before his brother notices I ain’t come back yet and Alan’s vanished besides.”

He rattled off the list, and she asked for two tickets on the midnight special to Riggs Station. Actually 10:30 PM, according to the schedule, but who was counting? Cheap tickets, since fewer people wanted to board at that hour, and that was good, but it wasn’t her main reason for the choice. Better to be on a less crowded train, and get to Blackwater still in some darkness. If they timed this right, and if Arthur could push hard enough and not need to rest up, they’d be across the border in Nuevo Paraiso already before the sun got too high in the sky. Sliding the money across the counter, she said, “Done. Thanks, friend.” She leaned in close, braced an elbow on the counter, lowered her voice. “If a big, mean looking bastard with a scar on his right cheek comes asking after me or my man over the next couple of days--”

“Oh, I don’t know nothing,” he assured her, a faint trace of a smile playing about his lips. “I’m off at 9 and the midnight special ain’t my shift, so what’s the name you’re leaving them under?”

Her brain stuttered to a halt for a moment. Sure as hell couldn’t say _Morgan_ , and _Adler_ might not be the best idea either after the melee in Van Horn. She seized on the first thing that came to mind that she could react to naturally, given it was hers to claim anyway. “Griffith.” Hopefully Arthur didn’t mind a woman giving him her name. If he knew what was good for him, he wouldn’t protest it. Maybe it was better for her too to leave Sadie Adler behind, as best she could, given what she’d become.

~~~~~~~~~~

He’d missed this with Isaac, arriving a month into the boy’s life as he had, but given he’d seen Jack as a newborn and it was much the same, he guessed they all likely slept about as much as Shawl Junior did. Made minding him easy enough, anyway. Let him sleep, say something soft and kind if he started to whimper, and if that turned into actual howls of hunger or the like, poke his head from the tent flap and summon Red Shawl from where she was busy doing her packing.

It wasn’t much, but it was about what they’d let him do, about what he could do, if he were to be honest with himself. He’d passed out from under the worst shadow where he was so weak it was all he could do to sit up and eat, but he wasn’t much better than that yet. Better to marshal what diminished reserves he had for the trip to Mexico, because that wasn’t going to be an easy one. He smiled wryly to himself, thinking a year ago, without bounty hunters roaming West Elizabeth south of the river eager for his hide, he could have ridden all through the night from Wapiti all the way to Mexico if he’d wanted, probably slept hard the next night, but come out of it little the worse for the wear. Strange how effortless that strength had been, how casually he’d taken it for granted all those years, until suddenly it wasn’t there.

Red Shawl peeked into the tent again, scooping up Junior, giving her boy a smile. “If you’re able, Rains Fall wants to speak with you before you go.”

He pushed up from where he’d been sitting, staring into the fire and half lost in a trance of his own reverie. “Sure.” He nodded to Junior. “He’s a good kid.”

She hesitated for a moment. “His name,” she told him softly, “is something we’ll tell the tribe once we get to our new place in Canada. It’s...a sacred thing, that naming ceremony. Not for--”

“We all got our rituals, ma’am.” The Wapiti had whatever their tribe’s naming ceremony was. Christian folks went in for baptism. All to the same purpose, wasn’t it? Bringing someone into that particular tribe, recognizing them. He wasn’t sure why she’d brought it up.

“But Snow Goose and I both think he should have a proper _wašícu_ name. Who knows in this world, maybe a time comes when he needs it. So if you agree, we’d also call him Arthur Weathers.”

He almost fired right back with a smartass deflection of, _My God, lady, why would you saddle any poor kid with my name?_ Kept his mouth shut long enough to recognize the compliment in it, undeserved as it was. She and her husband would seriously name their kid for the man who’d almost wrecked their lives coming to collect on a debt? About the only thing more hilarious and awful would be poor Archie Downes naming his first kid after Arthur. “You saved our lives,” she said insistently, obviously reading into his awkward silence. Yeah, and if he was the good man they all kept trying to believe, he’d have helped them fix the Goddamn wagon to begin. “We left my people so the Army’s anger wouldn’t fall on them for Snow Goose’s sake. Chances are we wasn’t going to make it through the winter alone anyway, just the two of us on the run, and me about ready to have the baby.” He couldn’t argue that. “Losing our things made us come here, join these people. So it was a good thing in the end.”

It still seemed like a weird trail of logic, but hell with it, people sometimes needed their comfortable illusions to make sense of it all. And if allowing them to name the kid for a rotten ugly bastard like him could somehow protect Junior in this life, so be it. Maybe that would be one more good thing done against a life with plenty of bad. “If you think it’ll help, then by all means.” Getting to his feet, he reached for his jacket, shrugging it on. It wouldn’t be much against the November chill, and thin as he’d gotten he couldn’t seem to keep warm easily anyway, but it would serve for walking only about thirty feet to Rains Fall’s tent.

The chief invited him in, and as he settled on a bearskin pad, he saw the man looking him over. No delusions as to what he saw. An outlaw, an outcast, a man on the run, thin and tired and ragged and sickly. At least he was washed, dressed and shaved, clothes and shaving kit both borrowed from Charles, so that was an improvement, though keeping his hands steady enough for the shaving cost him a couple of nicks. He’d had to settle for leaving a close-cut growth of stubble, because with his luck he’d manage to slice his own throat open with that razor if he went for a true clean shave. He waited, sensing that whatever Rains Fall meant to say, it would come in its proper moment. Probably a full minute or more, and then finally the man bowed his head, sighed, and spoke. “It’s good to see that you survived the madness of these past months, Mr. Morgan.”

He sounded so old and tired and beaten. A man who’d lost his people, his son, his entire world. Arthur could relate to that feeling all too well, unfortunately. Right now when it came to life, he felt about as lost in the woods as any man could possibly be. “I owe that to Sadie Adler. To Charles and you, for taking me in.” He stared into the fire. “I’m sorry. About Eagle Flies. I keep thinking if there was something...that whatever I done, it should have been more. Should have stood up to Dutch, gotten him to back off, maybe.” 

“My son was a warrior, Mr. Morgan. He was both too angry and too trusting. Much like you, I expect. But Eagle Flies was no child. Not like your son. He chose his path, though he broke my heart with it, and with how it killed him. But that guilt isn’t yours.” He huffed out a soft laugh. “Though probably you feel it all the same. You’re a better man than Mr. Van Der Linde. He may have been called your leader, but you ended up the man best suited to it. The best chiefs, they suffer for their people, they feel every loss. Being a chief isn’t about power. It’s sacrifice, carrying the responsibility of those who trust you. That, you understand. I won’t...” His voice faltered, failed for a moment. “Eagle Flies will always be with me. As I suspect he will with you, and the others you lost.” Blinking back the sudden threat of tears, he managed a nod at that. Mac, Davey, Jenny, Sean, Kieran, Hosea, Lenny, Molly, Susan. So many of them. “You’re only a man, Mr. Morgan. Accept that. It’s not within your power to save everyone. Not when you were that sick besides. But--I thank you. For saving Eagle Flies, when it was within your power.” 

“He saved me,” he said, finally daring to look up, not surprised to see Rains Fall watching him. “At the Cornwall refinery. That was--Favours shot Eagle Flies while he was saving me.” Because Dutch had left him there to die, just as he’d left Arthur up on Bluestone Ridge. “Your son died saving me.” The thought of it still burned within him, agonizing as the fire in his chest from the TB. “I tried to return the favor for another man, but I guess that didn’t take, so here I am.” 

Rains Fall sighed, nodded, seemed to sag a little further into himself in that moment. Breathed in deeply, and squared himself up. “You’re a hard man on yourself. So maybe I shouldn’t ask. But as a father who loved his son, if Eagle Flies paid his life for yours, then...live a good life. Remember him. Make his death mean something. Not being another tool used and broken by Mr. Van Der Linde.”

“I’m pretty sure we was all tools used and broken by him. Me included. Can’t say as I’ll live through the TB still, but I shall try. Get myself to Mexico and see what can be done.” Whatever living a good life meant, but Rains Fall had the right of it. He owed it to all of them who’d died to make his survival, however long it ran, mean something.

“Good.”

He watched the old man, grieving and up against the wall, but still dignified, courteous, wise. Mustering himself to take up the burden of leading the last ragged remnants of his people into exile in a foreign land, running ahead of the merciless government wolves pursuing them, and yeah, of course with the similarities he couldn’t help but compare this man to Dutch and his ranting about Tahiti. For so many years he would have called a man like this the delusional, weak fool, not Dutch. But it was Dutch who’d been delusional and weak in the end. “This has been...sir, I’ve learned a lot from you. I wish I had something to give you.” Some kind of hope, if nothing else, because he knew full well the pain the man was in. Nine years on and Isaac was still with him, and he always would be. 

“If you say I’ve helped put you on a good road, that’s reward enough.” He could almost hear Sister Calderón at that. _Helping people makes you happy._ Maybe it did, once he got over that old anxious fear of being taken in for a sucker. Planning on dying made a hell of a lot of trivialities like that slough off.

He nodded, accepting that as best he could, noting to himself that he’d better not make a mess of it either because now he owed Rains Fall also. There seemed to be not much left to say, but he found himself reluctant to get up and leave, all the same. Canada and Mexico--their paths diverged sharp as could be from the moment he exited that tent flap. Chances were he’d never see this man again, and some crazy part of him wished if not for the disease doing its damnedest to kill him, that he could go north too. Keep learning more from Rains Fall, maybe, and of course the Wapiti needed protection. It would be easy to be good, living that life, knowing what he had to do, who he should be, who needed the help. But his path went elsewhere. He’d have to find his own way to be a good man. Charles would help look after them, and they couldn’t have a better man for that job.

The question came to mind, and he let fly with it before he lost his nerve. If those dreams would mean something to anyone, maybe it would be here. More wisdom in the world than was found in books, after all. “Red Shawl said dreams mean something to your people.”

“They mean something to every people, I’d expect. We Indians don’t have some total claim on the spirits, Mr. Morgan.” He saw the momentary smile on Rains Falls’ face, and couldn’t help it, rubbing the back of his neck sheepishly, acknowledging the idiocy of how he’d said it. Rains Fall reminded him so much of Hosea in that moment, all mingled pain and gratitude at it. “Paints-The-Sky, the _wicasa wakan_ , went north already. He’d be the best to read dreams. But I can try.”

“Been dreaming a lot these past few months of a buck deer. Thing kept looking up and looking right at me, like no deer I ever knew, cause it wasn’t running off after it saw me. I swear I saw it in St. Denis once when I was awake, right in the middle of the city, though hell, that was right after I’d about passed out from the coughing, and maybe my judgment of reality ain’t the best at that kind of moment?”

“You’re a smart enough man. What’s a deer like? We say the deer stands for goodness. Kindness. Love. Generosity. Sacrifice, if it comes to it, so that others survive.” That smile stayed put, maybe even grew a little, amused and wistful. “Sounds like the right spirit found its way to you.”

 _Don’t sound much like me. And spirits? I ain’t saying I believe in all that_. But better to not throw that in Rains’ Fall’s face. He had to admit he probably hadn’t dreamed the animal over and over from some odd hunger for venison. Between Rains Fall and Calderón, maybe about time to acknowledge the notion there might be more in heaven and earth, like old Hamlet had said, even if he wasn’t sure what exactly he believed in all of it.

He held up again, hesitating. It was Rains Fall who finally found the guts to say it, getting to his feet and offering him his hand. “Goodbye, Mr. Morgan, and good journey.”

Leaving the tent, he figured he might as well make a clean job of it and say the farewells while the going was good, so he found Charles next, packing the last few things on Taima. Sadie would get the train tickets for Valentine for sometime in the night, and they’d leave probably not too long after dusk. The Wapiti would leave then too, try to put some miles on the road in darkness before the Army realized they were gone. All of them on the run and leaving behind ghosts and grief and broken dreams and promises. 

Here he could help a little, securing down a few things on Taima’s back, the two of them working in unison without much needing to be said. Though some things needed to be said. Tucking Charles’ bow into its holder on Taima’s saddle, he launched into it. “I said it and I meant it, right? You’re one of the best men I know.”

“You’ve become one of the best men I know.” It felt good to hear that, knowing Charles didn’t give out compliments lightly, though it took a lot not to turn it aside with a joke.

“Can’t say as I know what’s coming in Mexico and where Sadie and I are gonna end up, so you know where the Wapiti plan to go? I’d write you, if I could.”

“Sounds like they plan to settle near Lake-Of-The-Clouds, given Rains Fall says Loud Thunder had scouted up there last year. Send any letters to Banner. That'll be the nearest town.”

 _They_ , he’d said, not _we_. He thought back to Charles talking at the campfire, all confusion about his place in the world. Son of a black man and an Indian woman, two worlds and belonging to neither, another misfit and outcast sucked in by Dutch’s nonsense. “Well, if you’re likely to belong anywhere, it’s probably with them. They don’t seem to judge who they take in.”

“Thank you, Arthur.”

He mentally smacked himself, realizing how it probably had sounded. “I mean…” He had to try to not speak in a rush, not out in this cold air. Inhaling too quickly and deeply would set off a coughing fit.

Charles gave him a sly grin. “Ah, I know what you meant.”

“If it don’t work out with them, what I’m saying is--always a place for you with me, wherever that turns out to be.” He wouldn’t speak for Sadie, given who knew what her plans were in the long term once she figured things out. “Dutch--yeah, sure, he wasn’t what we all believed he was. And maybe he was the one who threw us all together in the stewpot, so to speak. But all of us? We was family. We _are_ family. The camp, the sitting around the fire, the times we spent. Hell, even the bickering. That’s ours, every bit of it. Old Dutch took a lot from us in the end, but he can’t take that from a single one of us. Not even from the ones we lost.”

Charles paused, right in the middle of lashing down his blanket. “Thank you, Arthur,” he said it again. But this one was genuine. He let go the leather thong and crossed around Taima, grabbing him close for a rough hug, which Arthur couldn’t help but return. “Take care of yourself, brother. You’re awful at it.”

“The hell you say! Pot, meet kettle.” They ended up laughing at it, though he took care not to laugh too hard, and he wished he could, make the parting done on one truly fine laugh that went on till his sides hurt with it, armor against the sorrow. This was the hardest part in some ways--the damn goodbyes, and knowing he’d have to live with that aching absence and all the memories. John was his brother too and he’d never see the man again, so he couldn’t help but keep some spark of hope alive that he wouldn’t lose Charles also. He’d write. He’d be sure of that. Sounded like he’d have plenty of time to do not much but read and write and sketch while he tried to recover, so might as well use some of it to keep hold of a tie that truly mattered.

~~~~~~~~~~

**New Hanover Gazette, November 17th, 1899**  
 _VAN DER LINDE GANG FINALLY BROKEN BY PINKERTONS IN FIERCE MOUNTAIN BATTLE_  
After months of dogged pursuit of justice following the horrible events of the Blackwater Massacre this May past, Agent Edgar Ross of the Pinkerton Detective Agency reports that the notorious Dutch Van Der Linde Gang is no more.

The gang, thought responsible for a long string of mayhem, theft, and murder even after the ghastly deed in Blackwater, ranging from a bloody shootout in Strawberry in June to a prison break from Sisika Island last month and a gun battle raging through the streets of Van Horn Trading Post three days ago, has been brought to heel.

The deaths of several members, including Van Der Linde’s fellow schemer, Hosea Matthews, in the failed robbery attempt on the Bank of Lemoyne in St. Denis in September, had placed a wedge and driven it deep into the heart of the gang. Reports of developing internecine squabbles and back-stabbing from an informant among the notorious desperadoes proved that the ruthless cutthroats were fast on a path of downfall. 

Pinkertons bravely attacked the gang’s Roanoke Ridge stronghold at dusk after the melee in Van Horn, risking life and limb from both Van Der Linde’s bandits and the notorious Murfree Brood gang known to operate in the area also. Quickly putting the criminals to flight, the gang had finally splintered completely, as agents reported them shooting and yelling insults at each other during their attempts to flee.

Further pursuit into the hills led to the demise of Arthur Morgan, Van Der Linde’s closely trusted lieutenant and the menacing strong right arm of the gang. Agents William Yancy and Jonathan Hill are credited with the shots that ended Morgan’s life, while enduring heavy fire from the enraged and cornered bandit. His last words are reported to have been, “You’ll never take me alive, you d__n fools!” Seconds later, those words were proven prophetic and the man perished as violently as he had lived. 

Others from the gang unfortunately escaped in the heavily wooded hills as night fell. Agent Ross has vowed to continue his pursuit. “This investigation has cost me the life of my partner, Agent Andrew Milton, shot down in cold blood in Van Horn. For his sake, the sake of many brave Pinkertons and other lawmen slain by this maniac, and all those who have suffered at this gang’s hands, I swear to live up to the Pinkerton Detective Agency motto: ‘We never sleep’. This case won’t rest. Whatever it takes, however long it takes, I will bring Dutch Van Der Linde and his bully-boys down.” With his top two men dead, civil war amongst the gang, and Agent Ross’ determination, Van Der Linde's reign of terror is over, and it is only a matter of time before his luck finally runs out.


	4. Wapiti: She Once Was A True Love Of Mine

In the end, the parting of the ways came with no fuss. The Wapiti headed north, they headed south, and that was that. But they paused for a minute, watching Charles and his charges--his people, maybe, and she hoped for that for him--disappear into the winter dark. Beside her, Arthur raised a hand, and she thought she saw Charles acknowledge the gesture one last time.

They watched as the lantern tied to Charles’ horse faded into the distance around the next turn of the mountain path. After that, nothing to stay for, no reason to not leave the reservation behind. The sight of it as they all rode out struck some deep chord, or a nerve, within her. Maybe a bit of both. 

She couldn’t look at it for too long. The last of the tents struck, only a few small shacks and cabins remained. That, and the dark gaps of exposed bare stone in the frost and sugar-fine dusting of snow to show where the tents had been. It seemed a lonely thing, everything that had made it home--even a sad one for the Wapiti--uprooted. For Sadie, it called to mind that plot up in Pinetree Gulch. She’d never been back. She never would go. The flames were still burning as she rode away on the back of Dutch’s horse, frozen in both body and mind. So she’d never seen the wreckage of it. But she’d seen enough burned out ruins to imagine how forlorn it must look. One more instance of melancholy failed hopes and dreams left behind for nature to slowly swallow up and reclaim it.

 _Focus on the moment,_ she told herself, stern admonishment to stop woolgathering. Fine to dream all of those idle thoughts in the slow times, but right now there was a thing as needed doing.

Glancing over at Arthur, assessing him carefully, she couldn’t help but see him sitting straight in the saddle, looking alert and watchful. A restful week wouldn’t cure everything, but it gave him some well of strength to draw upon for this. “You doing all right?”

“Rode only about a quarter mile, Sadie,” he said, tone bone-dry as the red desert she’d grown up in. “If I ain’t able to handle that, you might as well drag me out back and shoot--” He cut himself off with an awkward grumble, obviously knowing she’d chew his ass out for making another joke about that. “Yeah, never mind it. I’ll be fine. Got a horse, got somewhere to go, got some guns. It’s all right.”

For a man who’d been wielding a gun since--how long? She wasn’t sure, but she’d heard he’d been running with Dutch’s gang for twenty years at least, so probably most if not all of that. Even in the months since Clemens Point when she made up her mind to shed her weakness and paralysis and first strapped on that gun belt, telling herself that nobody would surprise her, nobody would touch her, nobody would take anything from her so easily again, she would have felt naked riding out without that security and reassurance now. She had to imagine it would have been the same for him.

The Wapiti hadn’t had as much use for sidearms, given they likely couldn’t even trade them without provoking wrath of folks asking who they’d killed to get them, because they couldn’t imagine any other way. It had been easy enough to get him a pair of revolvers from their stash, since his were gone when she found him. _Think one ended up over the edge of the cliff when Micah attacked me--the other? Pinkerton probably took it for a souvenir,_ he’d said with a sigh and a rueful smile. They probably had, because along with the bragging rights of that bounty, having a notorious outlaw’s gun would have been irresistible. _Fair’s fair. I ended up taking a gunslinger’s weapon a time or two. Though unlike them Pinkertons, I at least actually beat ‘em myself._

Revolvers at his side, a bow over his shoulder, handed over from Charles as they mounted up, with nothing but a significant nod between the two, some memory or the like between them. He’d refused to take a rifle, saying he could buy one later easily compared to them, and the Wapiti needed them more. She had hers, and that would be good enough. She’d take the lead, be the eyes for this anyway, so it was better she had the rifle. Though at least they were out of Murfree territory, and happily, the O’Driscoll vermin had been cleaned out thanks to their efforts, so hopefully it would be an uneventful ride to Valentine. “Then let’s go. We got some extra time. You need to slow down, you tell me that. Better that than you passing out and falling off your damn horse.” She’d managed to get him over Bob’s back on the mountain, but somehow she doubted hauling an unconscious man on the train in Valentine would fit well with the notion of not attracting attention. 

“Got it, boss,” he said, flipping her a little two-fingered salute from the brim of his hat. Buell flicked his ears nervously, clearly still not used to the man on his back. But Arthur was a good enough rider to handle it. She’d seen that. Hands on the reins even at a moment of ease like this, ready to help control even a big damn beast like that instantly. “We going, or we just gonna sit here?” 

“Going.” With that, she nudged Bob into a trot. They didn’t talk, riding in the cold late fall moonlight, watching the path intently in the darkness. Better to not get distracted, and better he save his breath. But it felt odd all the same to not say anything for so long, given words usually came easily between them, and she found she missed talking to him. There would be time for that later, though. The crisp air almost stung her exposed skin above her scarf. Winter was coming on, and fast. She hoped the Wapiti would make it to Canada all right, thought of Red Shawl and her baby son. 

Past Cumberland Falls, after the effort of fording the river, she heard that retching cough start behind her, unable to keep herself from wincing. No, a week of rest hadn’t been nearly enough for him. That sound tore up any illusions she may have unwittingly harbored on that score. She finally couldn’t help it, pulled up, turned back to him. Looked down to see the greenish crap he’d spat on the muddy trail, blood in it shining red in the dim light of the lantern tied to Buell’s saddle. He didn’t say anything, just rewrapped the scarf around his face, wearily hauled himself back upright from the sagging half-lean he’d been in, waved an arm in a _keep going_ gesture. There didn’t seem to be much to say. Damned if they did and damned if they didn’t--going too slowly only prolonged the misery and sapped his strength further out here in the cold, but rushing would burn through it too like setting a match to a dynamite fuse. He wanted to keep going, so they’d keep going.

Finally they made it to Valentine right about 10 at night by Arthur’s watch, riding down the street past the lights still lit in the saloon, and to the train station. She watched him dismounting from Buell, leaning against the horse for a moment longer than a well man would have, then giving the horse a pat on the neck and a low murmur of praise, “Good boy.” That done, he glanced over at her. “Well, as I’m dead and these fine folks don’t need to be hearing from a ghost, we’ll have you do the talking.”

“Might as well.” She wasn’t going to tell him that she thought it would be hard for most to easily recognize the man who’d raised hell a few months back in this tall, thin, tired figure with his soft rasp of a voice. It would be too cruel to point out how much he’d changed physically, given he had to feel it. Heading in, hearing the tread of Arthur’s boots right behind her against the pine floor boards, she told the ticket agent, “We bought two tickets for the late train to Riggs Station earlier. Name of Griffith.”

“Mr. and Mrs. Griffith, I assume.”

“Yeah, of course, who else would we be?” she asked, the unspoken _fool_ hanging right there in the air like a cloud of tobacco smoke. Instinctively she wanted to reach for the gun at her side, wondering if there were lawmen right behind them. Had she not been careful enough? Had that damn doctor talked?

He laughed, shaking his head. “Nothing by it, just making bad small talk, all right? Gets real boring on the late shift. You two got baggage? Horses?”

“Bit of baggage.” Clothes, the books and the like, two bison robes and a few other things the Wapiti had insisted on gifting them. The heavy robes would be useful, even in the desert, because she knew full well that the nights could get cold. Even if they hadn't been, their generosity was so kind she couldn’t possibly turn them down. She suspected some of it was the Wapiti would rather see such things gifted to friends than left behind to rot. “Two horses.” 

He nodded at that, glanced over Sadie’s shoulder at Arthur. “You don’t say much, do you, fella?”

Arthur shrugged at that, gave one of those small smiles of his. “She talks enough for us both. Got most of the brains between us too.”

She rolled her eyes at that. “Least he admits it!” The less small talk the better, so she headed for the platform, trusting he would follow her. The train had arrived earlier, lights bright in the night as it stood there in the station, so it was a matter of overseeing the horses being loaded onto the livestock car, Arthur having to step in to carefully coax Buell along, dropping their few things into the baggage car, and then finding seats. 

She would have let him have the seat by the window, so he could easily lean against it and sleep, but whatever code of conduct some moron had dictated wouldn’t have it. The man was expected to take the aisle to presumably protect his poor defenseless woman from--what, she didn’t know. Wasn’t like a pistol being waved wouldn’t shoot a woman a mere extra foot away every bit as easily. Besides, as she’d found on that trip three years ago with Jake, in summer when the train windows were open to keep it from being stifling, being a woman and sitting there meant getting the majority of the soot flying back from the engine. Given the choice between the non-protection from gunfire and avoiding the soot, she’d have preferred the latter. 

So she slid into the seat near the window, and he sat down beside her. The bench seat was small enough, and he was big enough, his hip and thigh pressed against hers. “Sorry,” he muttered, trying ridiculously to press himself tighter against the other end of the seat, and moving maybe a fraction of an inch at best. 

She sighed, lowered her voice. “You and me are supposedly a husband and wife, you know. You start trying to scoot away from me like this, people ain’t gonna notice that?”

“What people?” He pointedly glanced around the car. The only other passenger in the whole car right now was one man in the first seat on the right, and they’d taken the back left in consequence. “That fella?” But he gave up fidgeting, changed the subject. “Mr. and Mrs. Griffith, huh?”

“You prefer Mr. and Mrs. Kilgore?”

“Lord, no. Trying to claim my parents saddled me with the name ‘Tacitus’ and keeping a straight face, that was bad enough.” He managed a tired grin at her. “Though if you was gonna be Tacitus’ wife, that’d have made you Julia, I believe.”

“Not sure I see me being a Julia.”

“No, I ain’t sure I do either.” The whistle screeched, and the train jolted to life, picking up steam. The steady clack of the wheels on the tracks took on a soothing rhythm before long, and the lights of Valentine station faded into the distance, only the faint glow of the small lights on the wall of the train car casting some illumination into the dark of the night. Only two others had joined this car, and they’d stuck further forward, so they’d be all right to talk as long as they kept their voices low.

“Hoping no fool gets a mind to rob this train. Last thing we need.”

He sat back, let out a low chuckle at that, arms folded over his chest. “You was a real good outlaw, Sadie Adler, but there’s tricks you ain’t never had time to learn. We’ll be fine. Only amateurs hit the midnight special, midnight or not. Handful of passengers only, mostly poor folk buying the cheap tickets to travel at a rough time of the night. Nothing worth the robbing. Evening train, that’s where you find the money. Rich folk headed somewhere after the day’s work is done.” 

Good to see him amused about something, and she hated to squash that, but time for some serious talk. “We’ll be fine till Blackwater, you mean. You may be a dead man on paper, but I doubt word’s got out to all them bounty hunters yet. And I’m sure there’s still plenty of pissed off Pinkertons looking for Dutch and the rest. But it’s near winter, nobody will look too close at folks all bundled up, and I put us through there before dawn to boot, so we’ll have the darkness.”

“That was good thinking,” and he gave a nod of acknowledgment. A strange calm came over his features just then. “If it goes bad, you don’t fight. You start screaming for them to save you. Pinkertons don’t know you, or at least, the ones as survived Van Horn won’t have identified you just yet. So you, you’re just some poor woman caught up in bad business.”

Some spineless jellyfish, and it took everything she had to not reject that notion with everything in her. “What, I got seduced by a bad man and didn’t know til it got too late to run?” The words came out sharp and cutting, like slivers of glass on her tongue. She’d made her choices. She could have left after Horseshoe Overlook, Arthur had even offered her money if she wanted to go, but she’d stayed. Nothing better to do, perhaps, and nobody to go to, but that wasn’t all of it. The notion that here were some so-called bad men, men who could kill, men who could teach her to kill, stirred something to life within her that soon became an inferno. She’d thought she was so strong, capable of hunting and fishing and everything else. Six mean bastards with guns showed her otherwise one snowy night. So she’d chosen to embrace those bad men. Become a bad woman, she guessed, and what the exact cost of that would be was an ongoing discovery.

Another laugh from him at that, dark and brittle as her words had been, nothing like that warm little chuckle. “Anyone really gonna believe a woman like you wanted my pathetic ass in your bed? No, gotta be that I threatened you.” She had the odd sense he wasn’t talking only about his being sick from the TB. He half-turned to her, as best as could be done in the crowded seat, looking her right in the face, those green-blue eyes fierce in a way she hadn’t seen in a while amidst his exhaustion. “What you done already for me, that’s--look, I ain’t taking you down with me, hear? Enough folks dead already in this whole mess.”

She should have agreed, because he was a man who might still die soon, one way or another, and she ought to give him his wish and some small bit of comfort for all he’d spent of himself trying to comfort and save others. But she was so tired herself. “If I have them Pinkertons shoot me, Arthur, that dying’s my choice, not because of you.” _Don’t ask me to watch another good man shot dead in front of me, and say I have to carry on. I can’t. I’m all broken bits from Jake, you want to grind me right down to dust?_ “It ain’t all so selfless as you’re thinking. Everything I done...I killed every last O’Driscoll that crossed my path. Killed that fat bastard with my own two hands. But I could drown the whole wide world in blood and it wouldn’t never be enough. Because what happened, it can’t be drowned away. And I can’t take back what I turned into. I gotta live with that. Knowing what I am. Knowing what I chose to be. So maybe...maybe it’s what I need now. That chance of saving someone. You understand?”

He took being told he was part of her chosen hope of redemption gracefully enough, all things considered, given he could have been offended at being deemed as much a project as a friend. Sighed, looked away for a moment, rubbing his chin thoughtfully. “Sure, I get the notion. Been doing a bit of that myself. I just wish you’d maybe been able to put all that much effort towards saving someone...decent, I guess.” 

She couldn’t bear to argue his own decency with him. Not right now. Not when she didn’t feel all that decent herself, and at least he’d become better while she’d become worse, so if he wasn’t decent, what the hell did that make her? So she’d turn it into a joke and hope he could accept that, and they both could move past it for the moment. “Couldn’t find a widow or orphan or beggar to help. Apparently you was already busy helping all of them. Then you wasn’t quite dead, and well, that seemed like it’d do.”

That soft chuckle came back, and it eased something within her. “Yeah, all right, I could have left you one. Though my account’s got a lot more ground to make up, mind.”

 _Not anymore, maybe._ She eyed him, seeing the weariness etched into him, sensing how those slow-riding hours to Valentine had just about drained him. “You wanna sleep at all?”

He shook his head, rubbing his eyes. “Not just yet. I’d as soon keep awake until we’re clear of New Hanover and West Elizabeth both.”

Given there wasn’t much to talk about right then that didn’t hit some painfully sore spots, and a need to keep awake, turning to the books seemed like the best way to deal with it. She saw him reach for “A Tale of Two Cities”, wondering if he wished he could make the last six months all go away, if he could stitch his life back to the place before it went wrong in Blackwater when he’d last been reading that particular novel. At least she didn’t have a pending novel to finish, given she doubted she could bear to open that book again. The last one she’d finished, the night before Jake died, had been about a wreck of a ship named the _Titan_ , striking an iceberg and sinking, with almost everyone dying from a lack of lifeboats from a ship that everyone assumed was unsinkable. ”Futility”. That was the name of the book. It seemed appropriate enough for what came after that for her. Overly confident in the permanence of things, a sudden disaster in winter, and a hell of a lot of death and futility.

So she opened “Rob Roy” instead and lost herself in the Scottish Highlands, trying to ignore it when Arthur would pull out a bandana, turn away from her towards the aisle, and start coughing into it. Knowing he hated her making a fuss about it. But all the same, it wasn’t easy to listen to it, imagining how miserable and painful it had to be. Somewhere past Flatneck Station, she saw him as he sat there once again coming off a coughing spree, not turning back, leaning over with his elbows on his knees and head bowed. Bone-weary, suffering, but she could reassure him he wasn’t alone at least. She risked closing her book, reaching out, putting a hand on his shoulder with a reassuring squeeze He tensed for a second like a startled cat, and she almost let go, but then she felt him ease into the touch. “The doctor gave me some laudanum, if it would help?”

“No,” the word came out as a weary wheeze. He took a few deep breaths, cleared his throat, and the words come out stronger now as he turned back to her. “Last thing I need right now going through damn Blackwater is my mind all foggy. Besides, we all seen what the opium done to Swanson. Too easy to get hooked on the stuff if you take it before you’re just about ready to shoot yourself from the pain. I ain’t in a hurry to take on another vice. My list is long enough already.”

She noticed the bandana he stuffed back in his pocket was red to begin, as if to hide the bloodstains. It wasn’t to hide it from her--as if they all hadn’t known. But maybe it hid it from others. But she also knew why he kept grabbing it every time he coughed. He told her he supposed he’d gotten the TB from that debtor coughing blood up in his face. Sitting so close, he wouldn’t dare to risk her getting it from him. True, either of them could move to another seat, but a woman seemingly traveling alone usually got enough scrutiny that it was just easier this way. Besides, it was so cold in the train car that having the warmth of him there helped, even if she guiltily realized some of that was fever heat.

She kept her hand on his shoulder for another long minute, then finally let it drop as the conductor came through the car, announcing they would be arriving in Riggs Station in just a few minutes. They’d made it this far. Now came the truly risky part. He'd have to manage another ride from the train station to Strawberry first, and he already looked tired. “We can do this,” she told him, maybe as much for her own sake as his. “Shit, we got John out of a federal prison. Skipping through Blackwater in the wee hours? That ain’t nothing. You and me is all we need, remember.” As she said it, she had to wonder exactly how much _you and me is all we need_ that went far beyond the problem at hand. If she was ever going to be an outlaw on the run fleeing to Mexico, well, he’d be the man she’d want by her side. Though he’d probably joke that was a damn fine and damn odd compliment. Maybe it was.

~~~~~~~~~~

They didn’t talk much on the stagecoach from Strawberry to Blackwater, well aware that the driver could hear them if they got much above a murmur. Better to take the ride and the level of concealment it offered rather than riding into Blackwater on Buell’s back, bold as brass. Not to mention were he to be honest with himself, the ride from Wapiti to Valentine took enough out of him that he wasn’t sure he could have managed more hours in the saddle. Admitting that hurt in a curious way. He’d pushed himself up on Bluestone Ridge all right, pushed far too damn hard for John’s sake and then for the hope of wiping Micah and his evil from the world. Now he was paying for that because what rickety supports his strength and stamina had been on at that point, they’d finally shattered and the whole thing collapsed in on him. That was him right now. Something caved in, hollowed out. Nothing left but some fragile shell that might get crushed far too easily. _Consumption_. He felt damn well consumed, all right, devoured bit by bit by some invisible monster hiding inside his own chest. He wished it could have been some monster grizzly like the one up near Hanging Dog, something he could fight the way he knew how, and if nothing else, something that would make the end quick. Colm O’Driscoll and his boys honestly had nothing on tuberculosis when it came to masterfully slow torture.

The streetlights of Blackwater arrived far too soon for his taste, and yet somehow, not soon enough. He’d as soon be through the place, and likely never see it again. It was only a few hundred feet from the stagecoach post to the train station, and he kept his hat pulled down low and his collar turned up, stayed to the shadows away from a lamp while Sadie went in and got the tickets to the station at MacFarlane’s Ranch. All the while, though, scanning the streets at the few people that passed, trying to read them and see if they were looking back at him, if there was that double-take and that hard scrutiny that would mean he’d best be reaching for his gun right _now_ if you please. No point running for Buell because he wouldn’t be able to ride hard enough to make it north of the river. At that point, best to make sure he made enough of a ruckus that they killed him. 

The thought hit him in some curiously painful place. Sure, start a gunfight, and how many folks would die in that? They’d called it the “Blackwater Massacre” back in May, courtesy of Dutch and whatever Goddamn demon had touched off within him that day like wildfire. Blackwater, Valentine, Rhodes, St. Denis, they’d left a trail of bodies in their wake. Hosea hadn’t been wrong to say they’d become nothing but a bunch of killers. Taking a hard look at it now, he couldn’t imagine all of those people had really, truly needed killing. Did Blackwater really need another bloodbath in the same damn year for--what? His pride at being able to brag they didn’t take him alive, like that stupid newspaper article had claimed were his last words? His dread of the noose? Hanging could be a hard death, and he’d sworn at eleven years old, watching his father twitch and fight in the noose--a bad hanging, that, it didn’t break his neck--he’d far rather be shot than hanged, but he wasn’t that scared, angry kid anymore. To hell with it. He’d been suffocating slowly and painfully for a few months now. He could take, at worst, strangling for a few minutes at the end of a rope. If they did it right, snapped his neck, he’d barely feel a thing.

No, he’d made up his mind, and he felt calm and certain about it. Nothing to fear in death anymore. Whatever he had now was some unduly lucky extra time thanks to Sadie Adler’s stubbornness and loyalty. If the Pinkertons or the law caught him here in Blackwater, they caught him, and he’d let them have the satisfaction of watching him swing. Nobody else needed to die for his sake. He just hoped like hell Sadie would accept that as his choice, his final hope of being better than the man he’d been for so many years.

Nobody looked too hard at him. Blackwater itself was much the same as he remembered, gently lit by the streetlamps at this time of night, so much of it peacefully quiet, but still thrumming with a soft current of life and activity all the same. The place was half a city now, growing in leaps and bounds, and consequently, that meant that much like St. Denis, it now never fully slept. He’d walked or stumbled out of the saloon a time or two in the early morning hours, sometimes just for the hell of having a drink, sometimes plotting and yarning with Hosea with their planned fleecing of the real estate fleecers. For a moment he looked down the street as if that slight figure in one of his bright, fancy vests might be there, hailing him, telling him to come have a drink and a chat, spinning some glorious nonsense. Something in him ached to not see him, as if wishing hard enough could have made Hosea appear. 

He’d tore out of Blackwater on Boudicca six months ago, Hosea right on his heels on Silver Dollar. It was Hosea who he’d worried about then, his nagging cough and flagging strength that had cropped up over the winter and spring. Not TB--he knew the signs so well by now. It had been something else. Arthur himself had been fit and strong enough that he’d made it over the river easy as a thought, dodging patrols the whole way, guarding and guiding Hosea. Different horse now. Different man in so many ways. And no Hosea either, not ever again. No Hosea, no Davey, no Mac, no Jenny, no Sean, no Lenny, no Kieran, no Molly, no Susan. God, counting the cost hurt. Nine of them killed, in a furious, frantic half of a year. They hadn’t had nine killed, period, in all the other twenty-one and a half years he’d ridden with Dutch Van Der Linde.

Stepping over to Buell, seeing the high, irritated set of his head, he stroked the big stallion’s neck, slipping him a sugar cube. “Good boy,” he said lowly. “It’s been a real strange few weeks for you since you lost Hamish, huh? No wonder you’re out of sorts.” Buell lowered his head into the caress, his stance easing, though he cast Arthur a sidelong glance warning that he probably _would_ remember this whole business of being boxed up on a train. He couldn’t help but smile at that. The grumpy bastard had opinions and spirit. The best ones always did. 

He mentally slapped himself for his lack of focus when he barely noticed Sadie came back until she was right in front of him. “Train will be here in about twenty minutes.”

Not too long, at least. They waited outside, Sadie lighting up a cigarette, offering him one. He managed a laugh. “Love one, but my lungs likely won’t.” The last time he’d tried, he’d set off one hell of a coughing fit. 

“Shit.” She dropped it, ground it out under the heel of her boot. 

He could have told her she didn’t need to do that, but he was honestly too tired to turn it into some kind of argument. He’d take the kindness for what she intended, at least for now. He leaned back against the wall of the train station, keeping a careful eye on Buell, seeing him calmer now. “Well, how you liking this adventure so far?” 

“Running away in the middle of the night with a man? My Lord, won’t all them folks at home be _scandalized_.”

He thought of Beau Grey and Penelope Braithwaite at that, running away in the night on a train to make a life together. There was something desperately romantic to the notion, true. Young and defiant and determined to get away from all the bullshit of their families. Looking to the future and making the world better, rather than clinging desperately to the tattered remnants of a sick legacy like most of their relatives. Couldn’t help but smile, hoping things turned out all right for them up in Boston. She’d probably be marching in suffrage parades up there too. Good on her. If Beau knew what was good for him, he’d have accepted that already. “Give ‘em something to gossip about at holidays, at least, over Grandma Jane’s apple pie.”

She laughed at that, a warm and rich sound, giving a friendly nudge to his shoulder. The train pulled up on schedule, and he sat, still waiting for the recognition and holler for the law that felt certain to come. But somehow, it didn’t, and they left Blackwater still in the dark of the night, and he felt himself relax a little more. Dumb luck, some kind of divine whatever, he wasn’t sure, but he’d take it. Though he wasn’t sorry to see the back end of Blackwater again, and not only because of the danger of recognition. Even an hour there called up too many ghosts, the wounds still far too fresh.

The flat lands of Great Plains and then Hennigan’s Stead rolled by in the darkness, and the unending quality of it had a strange, hypnotic lull. He felt himself dozing, couldn’t really fight it. Dreamed of that other time, that other train ride into New Austin, the one from Galveston. Being so little that the recollection wasn’t a solid story to follow, only a few snapshots, flickers of memory that faded in and then out like a gust of wind. 

_Leaning on the window, barely tall enough to see by standing on his mother’s lap, pointing excitedly at a big herd of horses running near the tracks. “ **Mam! Mam, ceffylau!** ”_

_“English, Arthur. ‘Horses’. It’s America we’re in now.” But he felt the gentle caress of her hand smoothing over his hair, and heard the smile in her voice as she leaned in to take a look herself._

He woke with a start, and a cough at that, which sent him hurrying for that bandana again to cough into. He probably hadn’t seen horses like that in Rhondda. To judge from Annesburg, it would have been big, solid drays plodding their way between the railway and the mine, not the fierce grace of mustangs running wild. Small wonder he’d been enchanted by it in this strange and wonderful new land. _And what would you think of your boy now, Momma? The English is better, but the man sure ain’t. But I’m trying. That's more than Daddy could ever say._

The miles rolled on, and the changeover at MacFarlane’s Ranch went uneventfully. Still a bit before sunrise as they headed south, and the temperature warmed further. He wasn’t warm enough to take off the jacket, though Sadie shed hers. Something nagged him--MacFarlane. Hadn’t that man washed up on the shore of Flat Iron Lake had a letter addressed to someone by that name, who presumably lived there? He’d glanced over the water-stained letter to see if he could make some sense of it. The man’s last words had been about her: _And tell her...I never stopped…_ So it had been that important to him. The letter itself sounded half-crazy, rambling about how much he loved her, how bright their future would be, insisting that she was wrong and he’d make something of himself. But damn fool that Arthur was himself, he couldn’t help but see some familiar ideas. Wanting a woman so much who seemed so ambiguous about him, a disapproving daddy--was it like him and Mary? Whatever the case, the man had died for it, so it felt like he ought to at least let them know. The MacFarlanes would hopefully know who his people were, and if they weren’t complete stuck up sons of bitches, they’d pass on word. The letter wasn’t signed, so he didn’t have the poor bastard’s name, though. Didn’t have the letter either at this point, as it had been of course in his satchel. He’d had some vague notion of delivering it at some point if he was in the area, but given they expected New Austin to be forbidden territory for a while, that was right out. He could have sat down and written to this Miss MacFarlane and enclosed the letter while he was at it, duty to the dead done, but he’d had far more pressing matters at hand with the mess they were all in to worry about a small and distant courtesy.

As the train left the station, in his head he added it back to his list of things to do. Whoever he’d been, maybe she’d at least shed a tear or two for him, or tell those who would, so he wouldn’t die completely unmourned. He had a moment now, and no time like the present. Who knew how long he’d have otherwise? Might as well get it done right now. “You got any paper or the like?” he asked Sadie. “Got a letter I need to write.”

She raised an eyebrow, but dug in her satchel, handed over a couple of sheets of paper and a pencil. “Ain’t exactly gonna keep a fountain pen with all my stuff. All I got is the pencil.”

“That’ll do just fine.”

“Letter to who?”

“A woman that lives back at MacFarlane’s. Found a dead man along the lakeshore back when we was camped up at Horseshoe Overlook. He had a letter on him. I think he maybe meant something to her. She sure as hell meant something to him.” Picking up “A Tale of Two Cities” again, he made it into an impromptu writing desk balanced on his thigh. Waited for the coughing to pass, because it played hell with his handwriting, causing jerks in the letters.

As he bent his head to the writing, he heard her say softly, “Then she’ll appreciate knowing, even if it hurts.”

The writing was good, because it gave him something to focus on besides the journey, the future, and all of it. Here was something within his grasp. He could get it done, and feel maybe a little satisfied at having some something decent. He only hoped he wasn’t sounding like a complete idiot. 

He paused as they came up on the bridge at Manteca Falls. “Never understood why they named it for butter,” Sadie commented, looking out the window towards the roaring rush of the falls to the west of the bridge.

“Butter?”

“ _Manteca._ That’s ‘butter’ in Spanish.”

“You speak Spanish, do you?”

“Little bit, yeah.” She offered no explanation for it, but her accent sounded like New Austin, much as his did. Though he was proof enough that didn’t mean much--maybe she’d only lived there a few years as a kid, like he had.

“Well, then looks like you’re doing the talking for us again. I know about two dozen words of Spanish, and most of ‘em ain’t fit for polite company.” 

She snorted in amusement, leaning her cheek on her fist. “What, you know how to buy a beer, say naughty things to a woman, and insult the size of someone’s dick?”

“Just about. Blame Javier.” That brought another fresh pain in his chest that had nothing to do with the disease. Javier had hesitated, not really pointing the gun at him and John, and he’d walked over to Dutch slowly enough. But he’d done it all the same. He’d made his choice. Bill wasn’t that bright, and the two of them had always had that somewhat contentious relationship, Bill always snapping at Arthur’s heels and complaining about how he got no respect. Taking whatever chances he could to get a jab in, and if they hadn’t been in camp with everyone watching, and if he wasn’t a man who generally controlled his temper, the son of a bitch might have ended up with a bullet in his brain for that sly, knowing remark about that piece of shit out in the swamp. 

He hadn’t counted on Bill. But he’d hoped that Javi at least was smart enough to see sense. Though he’d been caught up in Dutch’s clever words for about four times as long as Javier Escuella. He could hardly fault someone else for not seeing the light. That didn’t make it hurt any less, because he and Javi had been close enough. He’d liked the man, damn it. Javier had fled Mexico for America, and now here he was running from America into Mexico, and everything seemed so screwed up, nothing certain or real. Maybe there was hope for Javier yet. Maybe he’d wake up someday, and see the truth. If anyone proved that it wasn’t too late for that, Arthur himself did. “Butter Falls, you say? I’ve heard of butterflies, but...”

“Butterfly--now that one’s a pretty word. _Mariposa_.” She said the word almost dreamily. He looked over at her, seeing the faint smile on her face, lashes half-lowered at some thought or memory he couldn’t know. She looked softer, sitting there thinking of butterflies. He had the thought that the fierce and fine outlaw Sadie Adler made, who’d ridden with him time after time, come back to Bluestone Ridge in the middle of the night and saved his life, was a woman he’d always admire and be grateful to call a friend. But he was glad too that there was something gentler like that in her that the O’Driscolls, and the wild and lawless life she’d lived after that, hadn’t destroyed.

“ _Mariposa_ , huh?” He looked out the window, seeing the tawny desert going by, pale flat-topped adobe buildings dotting the landscape here and there. “Mexico’s a big place. Any notion of where we go, or are we just riding this thing til somewhere looks good?”

“We’re going to Chuparosa.”

“Any reason?”

“The ticket agent in Blackwater said he’s sold some tickets the past few years to folks with TB headed that way. Supposed to be some kind of doctor there who’s pretty good.”

“I saw a doctor already.”

“What, that fella in St. Denis? Didn’t have the best bedside manner, and he seemed in a hurry to get a patient out the door and get paid. What did he do, take two minutes to look at you, and tell you that you’re just about absolutely doomed?” 

“More or less.” _It’s a hell of a thing, son. I’m sorry._ Looking at him as if he was already a dead man walking, no hope. 

She leaned in, hazel eyes intense. “There’s people that do survive this. Don’t you give up. So we’ll see this fella in Chuparosa.”

“Not like he’s gonna tell me I _ain’t_ got TB.”

“No, but he’s in a place people go for it, so he might know something to do besides ‘Put your affairs in order’. The worst that happens is you’re no worse off than you are now, right?”

“Suppose I can’t argue that.” He turned back to the letter then, wanting to finish it before the next stage of whatever this was kicked off. Kept stopping, thinking it over, coming back to it, as the sun rose at their backs as they traveled west in Nuevo Paraiso, through what Sadie told him was Punta Orgullo, and then Perdido. Sounded a little too close to “Perdition” to him, but maybe that was fitting enough.

As the train slowed to a halt in the Chuparosa station with one last low moan of the whistle, he scribbled the signature “Arthur”, instinctively went to write “Morgan”, and then hesitated. _’Griffith’ it is. Good a name as any. New name, new man, new life? Wish it could wash out so easy as that._ He signed it, the surname strange and unfamiliar to his writing, but he’d get the hang of it in time. Folded the letter and tucked it between the pages of “A Tale Of Two Cities”, putting it in his bag, and stood, ready to go face whatever Chuparosa and this doctor had to offer.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter to Miss [Bonnie] MacFarlane**  
Dear Miss MacFarlane,  
So it's a bit forward to address a letter to a woman whose first name I don’t even know, and you don’t know me either, but I have cause to write you some unfortunate news. There was a man I found washed up on the shores of Flat Iron Lake early this July when his boat capsized. We was in one hell of a storm around there the night before so it must have been due to that.

He died before saying more than a few words that I was to tell “her”, by which I am thinking he must have meant you--he never stopped, and what he ain’t never stopped, he didn’t have time or breath to say. But to guess from the letter he was carrying addressed to you, it was that he would never stop loving you. I lost the letter along with most of my belongings recently in some unfortunate business, or I would send it along to you.

Whoever the fella was, as his letter weren’t finished or signed yet, seems he was out to prove himself. To judge from the letter, him playing the knight-errant and fortune seeker wasn’t much what you wanted, but I don’t claim that as my business.

If he was a love of yours, my condolences on your loss. If he was a bother of yours, then obviously he won't be troubling you any further. But either way, even if he was comforted by thoughts of love, to die so alone and far from all who knew you is a forlorn way to go. It’s worse when it leaves people wondering besides. He was a tall man, dark hair, balding some. If he has folks out there, you may want to let them know as well.

Should have written about this sooner, but the year’s been a hard one for me and mine and all that took precedence for a while now. So I left this later than I would like, and I am sorry for that.

Yours sincerely,  
Arthur Griffith


	5. Las Hermanas: A Deep Breath (Then The Plunge)

He hadn’t been anywhere so hot and dry since those half-remembered years in the Armadillo area. It was northern California and Oregon after that, the few years in San Francisco after his daddy hanged there, and then with Dutch and Hosea, so many places--Montana, Utah, Wyoming, Colorado, Oklahoma, the Dakotas. Oregon, for a while back when Arthur was, what, nineteen? His first big job with them, helping rob a heavily guarded Wells Fargo stagecoach and Lord, Dutch had been boyishly giddy with glee at that particular caper after they pulled it off, laughing and handing him a whiskey bottle at the campfire, slinging an arm around his shoulders, saying proudly, _There’s my boy. Knew you for a special one when we found you. Knew you had it in you. Steady as a rock, you was. Hosea! Maybe it’s time we maybe start thinking bigger a few years in the future. We’ve got us a good one here in young Arthur._ Grinning at him in the firelight, delight and pride obvious in his dark eyes, and Arthur had been so relieved at that, knowing he’d done right, knowing they’d let him keep running with them, knowing they’d let him stay.

Nineteen. He’d met Mary a couple of months later. Already at war with himself to do whatever it took to keep that proud place fully acknowledged as a man that he’d so recently carved out with Dutch and Hosea, but also wanting this girl who could make him dream of other things, who made him feel a man too but in such a different way, something all soft and bright and hopeful.

Eliza had been nineteen, and dead at twenty-four. Lenny had been nineteen too, would never see twenty. Bright kids, good people gone far before their time. The thought pressed down on him with all the weight of the world, and the catch in his breath suddenly wasn’t due to the constant struggle of pushing his raw and exhausted lungs in and out. With that, he grimly tried his best to shove that off, as he’d been shoving it all off for months, running and fighting and running and fighting, then this past week, exhausted and sleeping so much that his half-awake mind couldn’t hold much in it, like water in a sieve. There would be time enough for sorrow later, but he couldn’t let it in just now. He had a doctor to see, apparently, and from there, who knew. Drag him out into the desert for the vultures to pick, maybe.

Sadie walked in pace with him, and he knew what a slow shamble he was making of it as they headed through the streets of Chuparosa, pausing in the open air market asking for directions to the doctor, which was apparently _médico_. Looked like his Spanish was expanding already.

 _Tuberculosis_ was the same word in Spanish, apparently, given the stocky young woman peddling fruit who Sadie asked about the doctor took a look at him, knew it at a glance, and asked. No point denying it. He nodded, looked back at her, seeing a sort of gentle sympathy in her dark eyes. She reached into her wicker basket, picked up a couple of the strange looking pink and green fruits about the size of his fist, covered in tiny knobby protrusions, handing him one, Sadie the other. “ _Pitaya._ ”

Awkwardly, he pointed at her. “So, uh, your name’s Pitaya? Um-- _llama Pitaya_?”

She sighed, though she was barely hiding a grin, teeth white against her bronze skin, so he must have really screwed up. The _you ain’t that bright, huh_ sound apparently translated just fine between languages too. “ _No. Me llamo Teodora. Teodora Mendoza._ ” She pointedly emphatically at the fruit. “ _La fruta. Pitaya._ ”

He raised the fruit up in a gesture of acknowledgment. “It’s a pitaya, you’re a Teodora Mendoza. Got it. _Gracias._ ” That one word he did know. 

Sadie had better sense than him, as usual, and filled in the gap. “Sadie.” She waved a hand towards him. “Arthur.”

Their apparent new pal Teodora Mendoza nodded at that. She pointed emphatically to a building a little ways down the street, helpfully with “Médico” daubed in bright red letters above the door. She said something else, but he didn’t catch any of it, and when he glanced over at Sadie, she gave an awkward little dip and shrug of her shoulders to say it went beyond her too.

“I get the feeling that’s a thing she done before,” Sadie said, as they headed off down the street.

He stuck the pitaya in his bag--he’d save it for later. Thing looked like nothing he’d ever seen before. It was a kindness from her, and one that struck a soft spark of warmth within him. _The world ain’t all rotten, remember._ There was still plenty that was terrible and cruel, but there was plenty that was good and gentle about it too. Little things, small kindnesses and generosities--a woman’s amusement at an idiot American with no Spanish coming into her town, but seeing him for a man suffering, giving him some food as a welcome, and carefully directing him to the doctor. “Seemed like. Guess she’s seen some of us dead folk walking coming round here before.” 

Hot and dry climate wasn’t making much difference to his pissed off lungs, though he hadn’t imagined it would be a matter of magically taking in a few breaths and being cured. But at the very least, the sun, which he hadn’t seen much of for a while, and the heat felt good, soaking into him. How long had it been that he’d felt cold in a way that didn’t let up, spending however much of his waning strength simply trying to keep himself warm? Probably since they’d left Guarma, and not being cold like he was soon after they left those tropical waters was about the only thing he could recommend about that whole damn disaster. In the cold and damp of Beaver Hollow he wondered sometimes if he might just shiver himself to death before the coughing could do him in. 

It wasn’t really that hot, given he wasn’t breaking a sweat or anything like that. But the lack of the dampness in the air, that helped more than he could say. For about the first time since he got his old jacket back again in Lakay--aside from bathing or being in a pleasantly warm tent in Wapiti--he shrugged it off, slung it over his shoulder. Tipped his head back, face to the rising sun, eyes closed for a moment, enjoying the feeling of it. He’d accepted that he’d die lying there on that chilly, wet stone, watching one last beautiful sunset paint the sky, finding some growing kernel of peace inside of him at having done something fine and right to close it all out. He hadn’t hoped or planned to see another morning, let alone one so fine, and in a strange new place like this. It spurred on a feeling he hadn’t had in a while--that longing to see another sunrise beyond this one, and another, and another. Not for the sake of needing another day keeping on some cause or task, but simply to be there and to see it with his own eyes. Hope, if he had to call it something, feeble as it seemed. 

Better than the last time he’d walked through a doctor’s door. He knew his enemy this time, even if not exactly how to fight it, and while he hurt like hell, at least he wasn’t stumbling and gasping for breath in that red haze of struggling to stay conscious. There was nothing here to fear anymore. The worst that could happen was he’d hear that the TB would kill him quickly enough, and well, he’d been living with that looming shadow for a while now. So he pushed the door open, and walked in. At least this time he wouldn’t be alone. He still wasn’t sure how he’d managed to compose himself in the five minute walk to Doyle’s before he met Sadie there. Should have figured she was too smart to not notice something off, even if she hadn’t prodded him that time.

In a matter of a minute or less, they Sadie left idling up front as the doctor took one good long look and briskly escorted him to the back room with a wave of his hand. “Shirt off,” he directed, gesturing him to a chair.

“Ain’t telling a fella to get his clothes off without worrying about names first more usual in a different line of business?”

That broke the brisk facade, and the doctor grinned at that. Maybe thirty or thirty-five, and to judge from the weathered lines around his bright hazel eyes, he laughed well and often. “Oh, that’s very good. You’ve got a sense of humor still.” His voice carried a soft trace of the Mexican accent, reminding him of Javier. Actually, a lot of reminders there in the close-clipped mustache, the carelessly elegant way of dressing, the grace of movement. He offered his hand. “Felipe Garcia.”

He took the handshake. Strong, some calluses, so he did some kind of labor. “Arthur Griffith.”

“Is that your wife with you, Mr. Griffith?”

Well, it was either continue that notion, or things being as they were in a town, far different from the woods and the wilds, he’d have to do a hell of a lot of fancy explaining about traveling with a woman who was neither wife nor relation. Easier to claim her as a wife, since he wasn’t sure a sister or cousin would have necessarily followed Arthur Griffith on this sudden quest to Mexico. He paused for a moment, unbuttoning his shirt, slipping it from his shoulders, doing the same to the top half of his union suit. “Yeah. That’s my wife...Sadie.” Arthur and Sadie Griffith it would be. One of Hosea’s first rules of a successful long con--actual first name, or something starting with the same letter at least. If he’d been running around claiming to be a Warren or Michael or whatever, too easy to forget himself when someone said the name and he didn’t respond. Dutch was prone to flaunt that rule with something ridiculous--Hoagy Carmichael, _really_ \--but then, not many men by that first name. Though he’d always suspected “Dutch” wasn’t his actual name, but never been brave enough to ask what it might really be. Even Hosea hadn’t known it. But really, a Dutchman named Dutch seemed a little too on the nose for parents to inflict it.

He followed the directions obediently enough while Garcia pressed the cold metal of a stethoscope all over his chest and back. Breathe in, breathe out, cough shallowly, cough deeply if he could--he could, though it ended up in a fit of coughing, and Dr. Garcia got rewarded for that by confirming that yes, his newest TB patient was indeed hacking up greenish shit streaked with blood.

Handing Arthur a clean handkerchief, he sat back in his chair, eyeing him like he was a particularly puzzling problem to figure out. “Do you know how you were exposed?”

“June. Only person with TB I’ve been around was this one man. We...there was a fight between us.” Not that Downes had given him much of a fight, between his condition and his peaceful disposition. “He coughed up, got some on my face. That must have been what done it.” He’d never know if that had been an accident, or maybe a singular act of defiance.

“You caught the disease off a single exposure from a stranger? That’s some bad luck. It’s not usual that it happens that way.”

“Seems my luck went rotten this year in a lot of ways.”

“All right, five months ago. What was the progression like?”

“First started noticing things maybe--late August? September? I was tired. Had a fever. Coughing a bit. But nothing unusual. It was a rough summer. Figured it was just me running too hard, sleeping outdoors too much.”

“Yes, you seem to have had a rough time of it. That gunshot scar’s pretty recent.” He nodded towards the still-purple starburst on Arthur’s left shoulder, courtesy of Colm’s boys. “Bit of hard surgery too, by the look of it.”

“Self-surgery at that. Heated up a file to dig the bullet out, gunpowder to cauterize it.” He gave a slight half-shrug. “It was that or get gangrene. It had been in there a few days and the boys holding me at the time, wasn’t gonna be anything nice.”

“ _Madre de Dios_ ,” Garcia muttered, shaking his head. “So--sleeping outdoors, and getting shot, held captive. Lawman? Bounty hunter?”

He noted with some amusement that _outlaw_ didn’t come up as a possibility. Bless the man for assuming righteousness as a given. “Bit of both, in my day, though mostly the second.” He had worn that star for a little while in Rhodes, anyway, so it would do to claim it, so long as the man didn’t want details. “And yeah, they shot me in August. I started feeling lousy not too long after.” 

“Kept you in bed for a while, did it?”

“For most of a few weeks.”

“You started feeling the first of the TB symptoms soon after? The fatigue, the fever?” 

He nodded in reply. “Thought it was just the last of the wound having started to go bad.”

“It took a lot of your body’s strength in fighting the infection and healing the wound, so the TB finally had the chance to get at you and take root. But resting that much, and lying down especially, probably kept it from going fully wild a bit longer. TB bacteria like the upper parts of the lungs. Lots of oxygen there, which they love.” Garcia traced the area on his own chest. “When you’re lying down, you’re breathing differently, stressing the upper lobes less. When did the symptoms get real bad, and you saw a doctor to get the diagnosis? After you’d been back on your feet for a while, going hard at things again?”

Somehow it felt comforting that the man could guess so easily and so accurately. It meant he’d seen enough of this to track his quarry with sharp eyes, much like Charles had taught him to track those deer. “About six weeks ago.”

“Anything set the symptoms off at that point?”

 _A shipwreck and running around a tropical hellhole run by some crackpot dictator with a god complex?_ “I ended up chasing a bounty all the way into the south of Florida. Got into one hell of a fight down there.”

“Must have been one hell of a bounty. But the strain of it, the swamps, humid air--might have finally done it. By the look of you, you clearly didn’t step back at all since the diagnosis.”

“Couldn’t do that. There was things I had to handle. People as needed me.” He’d done his best. All he could do was hope it had made some difference to those left alive. Hoped like hell John, Abigail, Jack, and Tilly were safe.

Garcia sighed and shook his head. “If I’ve heard that once, I’ve heard it a hundred times. Plus from how those bruises are fading, it looks like you took one hell of a beating about a week ago. A bounty got the better of you?” Now it unnerved him a bit to be so easily read, so much written on his body that this man could effortlessly follow. How close to the truth might he get?

“Yeah.” He couldn’t resist a wry smile. “Though I got my share of punches in too.”

“You’re lucky he didn’t shoot you.”

“I know that.” Though knowing Micah, it was a mark of contempt, nothing like mercy. _He’s sick. He’s dying._ Cold, dismissive, Arthur already forgotten now that he wasn’t a threat. “It’s...personal, that man and me. Reckon he thought I wasn’t worth the bullet at that point with me on the ground gasping like a landed fish.”

“Well, it’s not personal between you two right now, because if you go after him anytime soon, guaranteed it will kill you. So your wife put her foot down, insisted you rest?”

“Just about.” True, that wasn’t the whole story by half, but it hit the important points well enough. And Garcia hit the mark fairly in saying he’d kept the worst from Sadie where he could, and it had been her who’d insisted he stay in bed in Wapiti. “Then she dragged me here, found out about you. Wouldn’t take no argument on it.” 

“Quite a woman, then.” Garcia gave him a cheerful smile at that.

“You don’t know the half, mister. I’m a lucky man that she puts up with me and all my nonsense.” Without her, he would have died that night, no question. He still wasn’t sure why she’d put in all the effort, but she had. 

“Have you passed out since Florida from the coughing, being unable to get enough air?”

He tried to count in his mind, gave it up for a bad job. Everything blurred into one big haze of pain and fatigue and suffering after a while, plus he’d had other things to worry about for folks, rather than focusing on his particular symptoms. “A few times that I can remember. A few other times, things got--kinda grey around the edges.”

“But you kept going despite a still-healing gunshot wound and worsening tuberculosis, so you’re obviously built tough. And at least you could travel here. Walked in here on your own two feet without staggering too much, after what I assume was a long journey. So you’re not the worst I’ve seen, by far.”

“What’s the worst you seen, then?”

“An unconscious woman carried in by her husband. Barely breathing. She died only about two hours after she got here. They’d traveled all the way from Oaxaca. Close to a thousand miles, that. Walking, hitching rides. Carrying her most of the way. It took two weeks. Apparently they heard about me from _Señor_ Tomas Diaz, who lived in their town, and was a patient of mine a couple years back.” He rubbed his eyes wearily. “TB that far advanced? I couldn’t have done anything for her even when she started the journey, let alone by the time she got here. About all I could do was pay for train fare so they could go home and bury her."

From the flash of pain in Garcia’s expression, the sudden tightness around his mouth, it was a memory that haunted him, and he regretted opening his own mouth about it. _Me and my need to ask._ “Poor woman.” 

Garcia hesitated, then nodded at that in agreement. He gestured to Arthur’s shirt, folded neatly beside him. “Might as well get dressed again. I’ll go get your wife. We’ll talk about what’s in store.” He pushed through the door, leaving Arthur to it, with no sign of what he thought about the whole business. The fact he went to get Sadie didn’t seem that promising, though. 

After doing up the buttons of his shirt, tucking it into his pants, shrugging on the suspenders again, he reached for his belt. Hesitated for a moment, touching the talisman there. A lot of those other little good-luck charms and tokens had been in his satchel, so John had them now, and hopefully they did him some good. But this one had hung on his belt, a thing of carved bones and owl feathers with their sooty barred black-and-grey pattern. So it stuck with him all the way up the mountain and beyond. He wondered if Rains Fall had seen he still wore it when they talked in Wapiti, that of all things he’d been able to hand over when facing his death, this had stayed with him. Sacred to his people, the man had called it, even as he called it not much, and after he’d also said _even sacred things are only things_. Said that it was people who mattered, which was pure truth he'd seen, but hadn't fully realized, twisted around the notion of loyalty to people rather than simply doing right by them. 

But it wasn’t the sacred power the Wapiti might have thought it had that made him keep it close and wear it so visibly, even as people in camp asked about it. It was people who mattered, all right. It was what Rains Fall said by that gift, giving something meaningful to him, giving him the words that said that this man, wise and sensible and kind, thought Arthur Morgan was worthy of that kind of trust and esteem. The other ones, crafted by Seamus, he’d tucked away, but this one he wore openly for the memory of that feeling of honor. It seemed maybe that little thing of bone and feathers had some kind of luck to it in the end, because here it was with him still, and him not dead yet. He’d kept that, when he gave away even the hat he’d carried for twenty-five years, ever since his father handed it to him through the bars of his jail cell, and said, _Well, boy, seems you’re to be on your own now._

Carefully smoothing down the feathers of the talisman, he fastened the belt as he heard Sadie and Garcia coming back down the hallway. He could do with some luck in days to come, and the memory of Rains Fall’s respect and his wish that Arthur go live a good life. If nothing else, he could maybe die with a bit more peace than he would have that night. 

~~~~~~~~~~

Following Doctor Garcia back to his treatment room, Sadie tried to read anything from him, but there was nothing in his expression, the way he carried himself, or the like. Bland as milk, all of it. The man would have made a good go of it at a gambling table. But maybe doctors had to be like that, and keep control of their faces and emotions when around patients. Couldn’t be easy, telling plenty of people they had no hope because of whatever disease or injury they had, and trying to stay calm for their sakes.

Garcia pushed the door open, gesturing her in with a polite wave of a hand. “Mrs. Griffith. Take yourself a seat, please.” So Arthur had kept up their fiction of them being a married pair. She saw no reason to not do so--too much explaining to do otherwise. Arthur sat there in the patients’ chair, and there were a couple of woven wicker chairs there besides, with padded seats. Must have been how Garcia did things--saw the patient, then brought their people back to discuss the news with all of them. It seemed a finer way of doing things than urging the patient out the door to tell their family or friends, and it said something about the man.

Settling on one of the chairs, crossing her legs, she looked over at Arthur. Poker face there too. The only thing he gave her was the usual undeniable strain and exhaustion etched on his too-thin features. She couldn’t help it, feeling the need to reach out and take his hand in hers. If nothing else, no matter how bad the news might be, he wouldn’t have to face it so alone this time. There was that split second of hesitation again, and then the pressure of his callused and work-roughened fingers against hers, holding on tightly to her. That more than anything told her what his face didn’t, and she was glad she’d done it. 

Arthur finally broke the silence, as Garcia took a seat himself in another chair. “So what’s the bad news?”

“You’ve already heard the worst news,” Garcia replied dryly. “That makes my job easier.” He glanced back and forth between her and Arthur. “You very definitely have TB in your upper left lung, possibly to a lesser degree in your right. If I had the most modern equipment like a Roentgen apparatus here in Chuparosa I could say for sure, but unfortunately, I don’t. It’s moderately advanced for such a short a time of having it, but it sounds like the life you’ve been leading explains that. It’s not to the end stage yet. If you were, you wouldn’t have walked in here. But if you don’t change some things, it’s going to get there in a big hurry.” 

Neither of them spoke. That wasn’t all bad news, to Sadie’s mind, but it certainly wasn’t good. “There’s no actual cure for tuberculosis, Mr. Griffith. What we can do is try to let you recover from what damage is done already, and give your body a chance to fight back enough to contain the disease, and send it into a sort of hibernation. But it can always come back, especially if you let yourself get badly run down again. And with luck, the lesions in your lungs will heal, but they’ll scar. If it’s cold, if you’re working hard, if you’re coughing, you’ll probably never breathe quite as easy as you did before all this.”

She didn’t say anything yet, couldn’t really. It felt like it would be barging in, when this was his to say. She watched Arthur glancing at the doctor and meeting his eyes directly. “So how long are you thinking I got?”

“It could kill you in six months, ten years, or never. Some of that’s luck, but a lot of that depends on you. I’d say you’re willful, which is good, but you’re not used to taking it easy. So--how willing you are to do what it takes to get better?” 

“He’ll be willing,” she answered him, shooting Arthur a sharp glance. “What’s that gonna be like?”

“You’ll be giving up tobacco for the rest of your life, for one, because the smoke is an irritant to your lungs.” He eyed Sadie, raising his dark eyebrows. “If you smoke cigarettes yourself, _señora_ , I’d suggest you do it away from him.”

Thinking of the flare of guilt at his awkward joke about how he’d love a cigarette but his lungs wouldn’t, and realizing the plume of smoke between them that could set him off coughing, she shrugged. “Fine. Done. Guess I ain’t smoking either.” It seemed a small enough sacrifice. There were much bigger sins on her hands now than enjoying a good smoke. It struck her then that she'd already cast her fate with his, but what else was there for her? Dumping him on this doctor and then vanishing, and what would she do with herself?

“Gotta be more than that,” Arthur said, shaking his head.

“Oh, there’s a lot more. I wanted to see if you kicked up a fuss at a small thing like that.” Garcia pushed his chair a bit closer, folding his hands. “There’s the idea out there of bringing tuberculosis patients together in one place. For safe isolation to halt the disease being spread, yes, but also for people to get the right care. Because it’s so much for any family to handle alone. There are some formal sanatoriums, but only a handful. Not nearly enough, and nowhere near here. What we have here is...something like that, but it’s different too. I work with the sisters at the Las Hermanas convent. They help care for TB patients there as part of their charity work. For those coming in with family, like you, Mrs. Griffith, you’re welcome to stay there also, rather than being separated like you would in a sanatorium, so long as you’re willing to help them with some of the work of running the place. The patients who are off bed rest also help out where they can. It all works, and it gives patients the structure and time they need to recover. It gives them a community to belong to, which they need, given they’ve been taken from the one they had.”

“So there’s somewhere to go.” That was a relief, answering one big question.

“Yes. It’s admirable that you’ve come all this way with him, but running a household by yourself, and taking on the care for your husband--it’s too much. The TB ward at Las Hermanas developed as a response to that.”

Arthur held up his free hand to break into the conversation. “You’re talking ‘structure’ and whatever. What’s the _actual plan_?” His jaw twitched a little, as if he clenched it, then forced himself to relax. She had the sense that was him pushing relentlessly for facts. Too much of Dutch’s promising dreams and not talking any of the details. They’d all been guilty of following blindly. “Honestly, what’s the bad news? Ain’t like I can’t take it.”

“Remember I told you the TB bacterium has a harder fight when you’re rest? Aside from toilet needs, eating, and half an hour to an hour a day to take care of any other business, you’ll start with two months of strict rest to see how you improve. And I mean full rest, lying down.”

“Two months? Jesus, I got shot and it weren’t but two weeks before I was out of bed at least half the day!”

“And you probably should have rested a lot more to avoid being where you are now,” Garcia shot back at him crisply. “You’re welcome to ignore me, and when I see you back here in two months and you’re that much worse, then it’ll be _six_ months of bed rest, more damage to your lungs, and worse odds of long-term survival. Your choice, _señor_.”

“How much you know about TB anyway?” she asked. “No offense, heard that plenty of folks headed this way for it, but there’s a hell of a lot of quacks out there promising all sorts of nonsense to desperate folk. So I just need to ask.” 

“Yes, plenty of people head this way for the climate. Every few weeks, seems like there’s another one at Chuparosa train station hoping for a miracle. So it’s a disease you tend to learn a lot about because of it. I’ve spent a lot of the last dozen years working with TB. I get better at it every year, learn something new. Why, do you doubt a Mexican knows his business like a white man could?” There was a politely controlled skepticism in his tone that told Sadie he’d run into that before.

“Ain’t that,” Arthur told him, reaching up to rub his eyes tiredly. “We had a falling out of late, sad to say, but one of my best friends was from down this way. I don’t much care if you’re a Mexican or a Chinaman or anything, just that you know your stuff.”

“I try to stay up with what new developments there are in the field. I was at the American Medical Association conference in Denver last year. Lots of TB talk there, especially given the location. There was a presentation from a Doctor Murphy from Chicago. I’ve been implementing the latest technique based on his talk with some real success--artificial pneumothorax.”

“Look, my English ain’t that good, let alone high-flown medical talk, so you’re gonna have to break that down.”

Garcia let out a quick laugh at that. “Of course. It’s been noted for a while in TB that sometimes in the struggle to breathe, eventually, a lung collapses in on itself. Murphy’s come up with a way to actually control that happening. Introduce a needle into the chest wall,” indicating on himself, “and pump nitrogen in until the pressure collapses part of the lung. It’s like pushing on an air-filled bag to crumple it.”

The words all made sense as words and sentences, but what he said sure as hell made no sense. “His lungs are struggling enough, and you want to _collapse_ one of them?” Quack, for sure. She felt a surge of irritated anger at herself for dragging Arthur all the way here, and giving him hope, for hoping herself. All for something this stupid. “Arthur, c’mon. Sounds like a bunch of crap.”

Garcia held up a hand to halt them. “It sounds crazy, but it has worked. TB bacteria are like the people they infect. They need oxygen. If you collapse the part of the lung they’re in and are chewing up, the rest of that lung, and the other, healthier lung can make up for it, especially if you’re on bed rest or limited activity. And without that oxygen supply, the bacteria in that area will suffocate and die. It’s faster than pure bed rest would be.” 

Arthur gave off a slow, humorless laugh unlike any she’d heard from him, something that sent a shiver down her spine. “Treat them bacteria like coal miners, huh? Collapse the thing around them, they’re buried alive, and they suffocate.” What had he seen up in Annesburg to make him have such bleak humor about it? He smiled, in a tight-lipped and ruthless way, his eyes suddenly cold and hard. “Them ruthless little bastards been trying their best to choke me. I gotta say I like the notion of them getting a taste of it themselves.”

“The procedure isn’t without some pain. Plus the lung will slowly reinflate, so I’ll have to repeat it every few weeks until the lesions heal.”

“Pain and I ain’t unfamiliar, Doc. Not of late, for sure. Not before that neither.”

“I don’t doubt it.”

“Like Sadie said, lots of quacks out there. Few months back, I ran a snake oil salesman in for the bounty myself when he poisoned good folk with his shit.”

“If I didn’t know anything, I’d be one hell of a con man to have fooled an entire group of nuns into following along with my craziness.”

Arthur grinned at that, more a wolfish baring of teeth than any kind of actual humor. “Mister, I’ve known some damn persuasive con men. Fellas who could talk any number of people into all sorts of nonsense and make it sound not only possible, but just about reasonable. No offense meant, but me, I’ve gone a bit skeptical these days on folk promising miracles.”

“No miracles to be had here. I can’t promise results. I can promise it’ll be long months. It’ll be pain, and boredom, and frustration. You’re clearly used to being a very healthy, very active man, and this is going to be hard for you. What I have is the support of the system at Las Hermanas, a solid plan that’s worked for others, and my skills and knowledge.” He spread his hands, shrugging. “That’s all I can give you. A chance.”

At least he was honest. That felt encouraging. She had to agree with Arthur about now having a healthy suspicion of anyone ranting about high-flown dreams. “Two months of bed rest, you said.” She’d damn well make sure he listened, much as she suspected he’d complain. “This whole new-mow thing you learned in Denver. What else?”

“Getting as much fresh air and sunlight as possible. Eating well, to gain weight again. Keeping your mind busy--you don’t speak Spanish, do you?”

“No.” Garcia looked next at Sadie. 

She shook her head. “ _Un poquito._ I grew up in New Austin, but my Spanish ain’t much.”

“You’ll have incentive to learn it quickly, I imagine, and lots of time. There’s plenty to be done once you do, even for a man still allowed only limited physical exertion. TB isn’t the only good work the convent deals with, after all. There’s a need for teaching Spanish speakers English. Writing letters for people. Teaching people to read and write.”

Arthur murmured something to himself that she didn’t quite catch, but there was a low chuckle to accompany it. “All right. So--two months laying on my ass, learning Spanish, and you jabbing me with a needle every couple weeks. What else?” 

“I’m in favor of minimizing laudanum for pain, because of the risk of dependency. Have you been using it heavily?”

“Not using it at all.”

“You’re one hard bastard, huh?”

“I ain’t that tough. Been using something that an Indian chief taught me, and said it would help. Yarrow, ginseng, and either English mace or milkweed.”

Garcia leaned in, expression lighting up with interest, eyes wide and brows raised. “Does that work?”

“It tastes like chewing on the south end of a northbound donkey, but it kept me going, just about. The pain got better.”

“I’ll have to note it down, get some supplies in for Las Hermanas. Anything to cut down opiate use but not leave patients suffering, I’m in favor. Equal parts of each?” Arthur nodded at that. “Thank you.”

“Bit surprised you’d be interested in herblore,” Arthur said. “Being as you’re all with the modern techniques and whatnot.”

“Wisdom in many places, Mr. Griffith,” Garcia answered him with a grin.

“Got another one for you, then,” Sadie told him. “Yarrow, sage, and Indian tobacco. It makes a good cough syrup.”

“That Hosea’s remedy?” Arthur asked, voice suddenly gone soft and low. “I remember him teaching me that one a few years back, when his cough started. Too impatient to really appreciate it then. Did me a world of good this year, though.”

She nodded, remembering sitting with the man at the scout fire, him patiently teaching her how to make the syrup. Swapping recipes with each other, hearing about his childhood in the Appalachians, wishing she’d known someone like him before she and Jake got in over their heads in some ways. He’d been taking time to check on her, to spend time with her, make her know she was one of his now in that understated and caring way that he had that she’d noticed extended to everyone in camp. Dutch was all lightning and thunder, dramatic and sudden, that made everyone sit up and take notice, take action. Hosea was the quieter rainshower that kept things alive.

She noticed Garcia jotting down the notes. “What else you got?” she asked, wanting to get the subject off Hosea, sensing how much it still hurt Arthur to think of a man who’d been like an uncle or more likely a father to him for years. Hell, she grieved him herself, because it seemed like the best of the gang died the day Lenny and Hosea did, and she’d known them both only a matter of months.

“Wearing a mask whenever you’re not in your room. Outside, you’ll want it to help keep from inhaling any dust in the wind. Generally, you’ll wear it to help keep from spreading the TB. No need to do so around Mrs. Griffith, though, or--do you have any children?”

“No. No kids.” Tried to not feel the pang at realizing she probably never would now. It wasn’t as though she had had much to offer a child at this point, given who she’d turned into in the end. It was for the best. “We...we was putting that off for a while.” Not sure why she felt compelled to explain how it had been with Jake, except that it sounded better than offering no explanation, and Garcia maybe wanting to poke into the matter, and offer some medical help in that department.

Arthur nodded at Sadie. “You ain’t worried about her? Why?” He’d been so careful to not cough on her, and that hadn’t mattered?

Garcia answered coolly. “She’s been around you for months. Kissing you. Sharing the same bed, even, and you can’t really control coughing in your sleep. But she’s still healthy as a horse.”

Arthur snatched back his hand from hers like he’d been scalded, eyes going wide in horror, staring at her with an expression of panicked misery. “Sadie--ah, shit, I’m sorry.”

She couldn’t help the flicker of fear. She’d seen how bad it had been for him, and the thought of going through it herself couldn’t help but terrify her a bit. She couldn’t say anything at that moment, only look back at him. “Not your fault,” she managed finally. Besides, they hadn’t been kissing or sharing a bed or any of that, so maybe it wasn’t as bad as all that. If it was, well, it was. She’d see Jake soon enough in that case. 

Garcia must have noticed it, because his voice went low, calm, soothing. “There’s no need to worry. Honestly, TB is so prevalent that most people probably have some of it in their body. You may well have had it in your lungs long before that man you fought. She probably had some in hers even before you got sick. But for most people, it never turns into anything, because they’re healthy enough to keep the bacteria at bay.”

“All right,” she replied, feeling her heart start to slow from its triphammer pace, breathing a bit easier. “It’ll be good we don’t need to be apart, I guess?” 

“Granted, you’ll have separate beds in your room, because a convent isn’t exactly built around the notion of folks who would be sharing.” Garcia’s eyes took on an impish twinkle. “By the way, no intimate relations until Mr. Griffith is cleared as strong enough for you two to go hold down a place of your own to live. Convent decorum, you know, plus the strain’s bad for his health.”

She somehow managed to not burst out laughing at that, looking over to see Arthur blushing like an embarrassed schoolboy and avoiding her eyes, and that did it, the laugh came out anyway, first as a snorting snicker, then as rolling peals of laughter. They’d gotten in deep as anything before they realized it, for sure. Now they were committed to this whole business of pretending to be married, but able to sleep apart and not worry about people wondering about them not rocking the bed, all while being a pair of ex-outlaws hiding out among a bunch of nuns. The whole thing sounded like a damn comedy fit for the stage. But then it also stung. This fib of them being husband and wife caught them in its web neatly, but she couldn't back down now. Besides, it sounded like there would be a place for her at this Las Hermanas as his supposed wife, and otherwise, they'd likely shut the door in her face. She wasn't going to abandon him like that to the care of strangers, in a strange land where he didn't even speak the language. What would she do with herself, anyway? They were going to stick together and that was that. If they had to sell a story, she could do that. Obvious that nobody would expect them to be the affectionate married folks, or her turning up pregnant, or anything like that. She'd let him keep borrowing her maiden name a while until he had some choice in his road before him, and they could see then what happened. It would be all right. She could withstand that, in the interest of getting them what they needed right now: care for him, a place for them both to stay. Jake would know the truth, and so would she and Arthur, and that was what mattered.

She finally heard him joining in, that soft and husky laugh he had now, and couldn’t help but smile at him. _One crazy life, huh?_

His slight answering smile said it: _One crazy life, all right._

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
Made it to Chuparosa. Immediately made an idiot of myself with my lack of Spanish. Gave a woman a good chuckle by it, and she took some pity on me. Some things ain’t never gonna change, whatever the land or language.

The doctor here says it’s nothing nice but there’s some cause for hope, though the road is by no means easy. Some newfangled treatment he wants to try. At least there’s no building himself a mechanical “son”, so Felipe Garcia can’t claim to be the craziest doctor I met by far. He gives straight answers rather than bristling at being questioned, so that seems promising. I guess after Dutch, my skepticism is healthy even if the rest of me ain’t. So I’ll spend the next couple of months listing my occupation as “invalid”, though beyond that, I ain’t quite sure. There’s the duty to make something of myself for those who haven’t got that chance, and how Sadie seems to need this to succeed, thinks saving me will do her own struggles some good. I wish I could believe otherwise, but like as not, she’ll run up against my usual habit of being a disappointment to women. 

Now that the rush to get here is done, I have no notion what the hell happens now. Can’t say as I ever imagined myself living the contemplative religious life, as I apparently will be for a while. But there are plenty of sins in me to reflect on, so that should keep me busy enough.

Suppose I could consider the priesthood. Hosea mentioned he thought about it once. Ain’t a Catholic, but then, ain’t much of anything. Celibacy and never marrying, that's not much different from life as is. Poverty’s nothing unfamiliar, and obedience should be no fuss for a fool who blindly followed a man who proved himself a maniac in the end. Though I was no good as a father, so I don’t imagine I’d be much good as a Father. Can’t see myself comforting folk, or answering the big questions when I can’t much answer them myself. 

Before, at least we was sure of what had to be done and why. Now I ain’t even got that, just a good solid plan of how to get better, and a whole lot of questions and doubts towards what I aim do with that. The hope is there all the same, but it’s hard to put it in its right place.

 **Sadie’s Journal**  
At camp Arthur was always scribbling away in that journal of his, so there must be something helpful to it. My thoughts have been nothing but like a bunch of raindrops these past six months, all scattered confusion. Plenty that I ain’t saying to anyone anyway these days, so many secrets I now am left keeping. So maybe writing it down will do me some good.

All my years in Tumbleweed, we never went south of the border. Well, here I am now, after wandering real far from New Austin first. Mexico is beautiful and strange, including the music I heard at the market here in Chuparosa. Makes me miss my songbook burned up back at the ranch. Though between what I remember of those songs, and then the ones I learned with the gang (my Lord, those will be a treat to write down, all them ones that are gloriously filthy as a hog-pen) maybe it’s time to start that up again.

Seems we was lucky to end up where there’s a doctor and a place where Arthur might hopefully get better, though it’ll be a long time. So for now, looks like I’ll be living in a convent. Wouldn’t Grandma Rosie cackle at that, given how she used to threaten me with it! 

Living with a man claiming he’s my husband, to the point of being lectured on not taking him to bed because of his sickness and the convent rules. I’ll laugh at that, because sure, it’s funny. But there’s pain too, and pain no herblore can touch. Jake, I miss you every hour still. Believe me that I ain’t betrayed you. Still your ring that’s on my finger, and even if folk will assume it’s his, you and me and him all know better than that. I would have buried Arthur because he buried you for my sake. But I found him alive, and he deserved more than to throw his life away. It’s something I can’t figure how a fine man believes real as anything that no good is in him. I can’t much understand him sometimes. 

I know this for sure. He ain’t you, Jake, and he ain’t mine besides. Even if I wanted him to be, I don’t think I am meant for anyone now. Not after all that they done to us. Not after all of what I done to them. We was good people. I think I ain’t that. Not anymore. Maybe you wouldn’t know me now. I don’t have TB, though the doctor scared the shit out of me for a minute thinking I might, but there’s plenty in me that’s gone sick all the same. But maybe if I can help him, help other people too, someday I can face myself in the mirror again and see me, not someone gone all strange and wild.


	6. Las Hermanas: Death Is A Woman

Living now under the bright Mexican desert sun, Arthur felt like he hadn’t fully realized how glum Beaver Hollow had been in the fall until now, autumn twilight in the foggy mountains. Felt like the sun going down on all of them to look back on all of it, miserable and scared and all the best of the gang evaporated like that missing sunshine. They hadn’t been actually _living_ in the cave, rather outside of it, but that felt like a pedantic argument at best. Perhaps Pearson and Susan had intended it that way when they set up camp, so they could maintain that last sliver of pretense that they hadn’t descended fully into savagery to the point of living in a cave and being ready to fight over the smallest thing like folks presumably had so long ago. 

They’d started this year pretending they were the smart ones, seeing clearly through all the bullshit of America to some deeper truth, but as 1899 wore on, they got pushed further and further into the things they swore they weren’t, lines they’d thought they’d never cross. Nothing but killers, Hosea had said, and rightly.

So even as the sun felt good, warm and bright, there was something cold and troubled within him, like a shard of ice. Sadie had hauled him away from where he’d thought to die, they’d made it down from Ambarino, all the way over the border, but some things couldn’t be so easily left behind.

As was, though, he tried his best to shove that from his mind where he could. Too easy to dwell on dark thoughts when he didn’t have the release of keeping himself busy to the point of exhaustion as he had for months and months. Must have been the only way he’d survived the ordeal since Blackwater with only going about half crazy rather than doing it fully. He hadn’t had much time to think, but whenever he did, damn, had it caught up with him and knocked him around brutally, made him doubt and worry. All to the good in the end, given that Hosea had been right on another thing--he’d needed to start thinking for himself--but given there wasn’t much he could do with himself for the next few months, he wasn’t sure he could bear all the weight of it if he let it in.

So distraction was a welcome thing. Not to mention trying to learn Spanish took all his attention. He had the Welsh from his parents, rusty and buried as it was, but he’d learned that naturally as English, too young to realize it. Trying to learn was no mean feat. He could somewhat understand it being taught, especially if it was written rather than it twisting elusively like it did when he tried to listen, but yet another point hit home of exactly how much out of his depth he was here, and how little he knew. 

Jesus, what an idiot. He’d had Javier as a friend for five years, and he hadn’t asked the man about learning any Spanish--why? Fear of calling up bad memories of Mexico, of making him dwell in what he’d left behind even as he tried so hard to make himself so thoroughly _American_? Arthur could sympathize with that, given he’d done the same. Or had he only been afraid to look stupid himself by admitting how little he knew, and how much he’d maybe struggle in learning?

Well, whatever the cause, he sure looked stupid now. He eyed them, Sister Juanita and Pedro Estevez, the two poor fools who’d patiently undertaken for the past two weeks to teach him for two hours a day up here on the roof of Las Hermanas. Garcia sighed that he insisted on dragging himself up here given his strict limits on time out of bed, but agreed wryly that with his and Sadie’s room on the second floor, it was actually an easier trip to the roof than to the courtyard, let alone the latrine. Plus it was quiet here--most TB patients tended to go for the shady courtyard. He’d rather soak up as much sun as he could, and hope it chased the lingering chill from his bones.

Pedro eyed him back, near-black eyes bright with amusement, a smile playing about his lips that the dark mustache couldn’t quite hide. He was about Arthur’s own age, a farm laborer who’d become one of Las Hermanas’ TB cases. Been here near to a year, he said. Considering he looked almost like a normal man again, that was some cause for hope. “Try it again. _Yo quiero._ ”

Like a good parrot, he echoed it. “ _Yo quiero_. That’s--’I want’, yeah?”

 _I want._ Not much good ever came for him in wanting things, let alone saying it openly. He doubted that had changed. 

“Good,” Juanita said. She smiled, showing white teeth with a slight gap between the front two. That, and the lines of a woman who’d smiled often in her thirty-odd years, gave her face some character that he liked, despite being framed by the severe lines of that nun’s wimple. “ _Bueno._ ”

Strange kind of schooling trying to learn Spanish while lying here on a cot flat on his back, head turned towards the man and a woman sitting there beside him. But Pedro had been there himself not so long ago, and Juanita had seen her share of men and women like this, so that made a lot of the awkwardness pass. They were kind. Everyone here was pretty kind. Had to be, to make this whole notion of the lost and dying into something more than a place without light or hope. He still wasn’t entirely sure what to make of it.

Something nudged his ribs then, and he lifted his head and glanced down to see a little tar-black ball of fur cozying up there, after having jumped up from the ground.

Sadie told him that Sister Ursula, who ran the kitchens, kept around her fair share of cats, to keep any rats at bay ostensibly, but he had the suspicion, having met the woman, that she was a soft touch underneath it. Besides, folks here didn’t seem to mind a cat taking a mind to come up and say hello. Shut away from the rest of the world as they were, a cat became a novelty.

This was one of the kittens from whichever cat’s apparent latest litter, all too-big paws and fearless curiosity. Reminded him a bit of Copper, at that. It settled in comfortably against his side, and he reached down, stroking the silky-soft fur, feeling the little thing arch into the caress, its green eyes sliding partly shut in delight. “You bored and saying ‘hi’, huh?”

“Oh good,” Juanita said. “Another opportunity. What’s ‘the cat’ again?”

This one he remembered, given he’d heard it said often enough, usually by someone pleased to see one of the local cats coming to pay a call. “ _El gato._ ”

“Good. Except I know this one’s a girl. So that becomes _la gata_.” All right, “the female cat”. He could handle that. He’d have to write all this down later, back in the room he shared with Sadie, when he headed in for the afternoon. Only so much sun he or anyone could take, and the mid-afternoon nap-- _siesta_ \--wasn’t only for folks hacking their lungs up. Sounded like pretty much everyone did it to avoided the fiercest and hottest part of the day.

Pedro grinned. “ _La gata negra._ ” That was--”the black female cat”?

Juanita chuckled right back at him. “ _La gatita negrita._ ” He gave up following the two of them as impossible. It was almost understandable, but too far out of reach. 

He could barely make sense of English, and here came this language where everything was all male or female whether it was alive or not, things that were alive and the opposite sex of the noun changed the thing, and then adjectives all changed for that, he couldn’t help but despair of his brain ever being able to handle it. He groaned. “ _Mierda._ ” Yeah, that one he knew well enough. “Look, you two? Might as well drag me out back and leave me for the coyotes. Even if the TB don’t get me, I ain’t never making enough sense of this to survive in Mexico.”

Juanita kept laughing, giving a wink over to Pedro. “You’re making good progress. You’ve only been at it two weeks, Arthur.”

“Come on now, it’s better than getting stuck by _El Cactus_ ,” Pedro joked flippantly. He’d walked shakily out of Garcia’s office after his first encounter with the Garcia’s lung-punching apparatus, then got another session two days ago to jab his chest with the needles again and keep that part of his left lung deflated during one of Garcia’s regular visits here to Las Hermanas. Doing something like fifteen of them here at the convent, one after another--strange brotherhood indeed. They’d been sitting, or lying there for the newer ones, waiting their turns, men and women, brown and black and white skin all together there united in their shared ordeal, wryly joking about appointments for getting stuck by _El Cactus_ , “the Cactus”. Watching the bellows of the machine at work, filling him with that nitrogen gas, Arthur had the feeling of being something like a very demented accordion himself these days, worked and pushed and squeezed until he awkwardly squawked. Breathing came shallower and harder, given he was currently on a lung and a half, but he had to admit Garcia’s insane-sounding procedure seemed to have some effect. He’d felt a bit less pain, coughed up less. So maybe that thing did him some good. The barest scratch on the whole thing, but it was the first sign of something better rather than rapidly and steadily worse, so he’d take it.

“Just about.” That was about as much as he’d concede.

Juanita shook her head, not bothering to hide her grin. “Enough Spanish for today. Seems you’ve made a new friend,” she nodded to the demanding fluffball currently making herself at home burrowing against his side. “Let’s let you enjoy that. We’ll pick up again tomorrow morning.”

He’d take that. He would have picked up a book, hopefully finished “A Tale of Two Cities”, though he had a strange suspicion he knew _exactly_ what Sydney Carton planned to do with his sad, worthless life, and he couldn’t help but approve. He’d had his own Charles Darnay in John, hadn’t he? But the kitten decided apparently his ribs weren’t a good enough place, and clambered onto his chest, settling down again and making herself right at home. Started up a happy rumbling purr, and he felt the gentle vibrations of that right into his chest. A far more pleasant sensation than the horrible Cactus’ wheezing pressure, or the pain of coughing. He stared down at her. “Making yourself at home, Princess? We wasn’t even properly introduced before you went and invited yourself.” Looked like he wouldn’t be reading, given he’d have ordinarily propped the book on his chest right where she’d laid down.

So he felt himself dozing off into that part-lucid twilight state, feeling like one of those lazy alligators in the bayou lying there soaking in the heat, one hand on the kitten. She shouldn’t be here, trusting him like that. Wasn’t like he had much of an impressive record in protecting small and fragile things. He wondered where Jack was right now, somewhere far away from Beaver Hollow. How much would he remember of all this in the future, one little four-year-old boy with his still-innocent eyes? Would he remember fishing and songs around the campfire, or the violence and terror that they finally hadn’t been able to hide from him in the end?

Then he heard someone say, “ _Buenas dias, Señor_ Griffith,” coming out onto the roof from the stairs, and he welcomed the interruption. Being left alone with himself for too long with nothing to do never ended up too pretty. “Mother Superior Miguela told me that you’re newly--”

Pulling himself out of his miserable dark hole of thoughts, he recognized the voice at the same time she must have recognized him, even with the black kerchief covering the lower half of his face as it did. Instinctively, he sat up, keeping hold of the startled cat with one hand, avoiding a wince as she dug tiny claws into his shirt and his chest for a moment, then settling her beside him. She didn’t run off, which was a wonder. Sat up too quickly and for a moment his head swam, and he forced himself to breath slow and easy, trying to not start coughing. 

“Hello again, Mr. Morgan,” Sister Calderón said, standing there, one hand on the adobe wall, looking at him.

He managed, “Hey, Sister.” She took a good look at him, not saying anything else just yet. Six weeks since he’d seen her at Emerald Station, was it? Two weeks here of mind-numbingly frustrating rest had helped, but he still looked worse than he did then, no question. _Good thing you wasn’t there three weeks ago when Sadie had me pass for dead no problem, and I couldn’t even sit up without help._ “Guess you made it to your mission in Mexico?” 

“I’ve been around Perdido and Punta Orgullo the last few weeks, yes, gathering donations.” She gestured to the other side of him from the kitten. “Do you and your little friend mind if I sit?” 

He waved a hand in invitation. Couldn’t quite forget their last conversation, and he felt like she ought to know that. As she settled in, he figured best to have at it. “The things you said last time I saw you--they was--that was a hard time, me trying to know what to do with myself. It...it helped me. More than you know, maybe.”

“I’m glad.” He envied her that calm certainty she seemed to have no matter what. It was that dignity of wisdom, of choosing to face the world and its people with serenity and gentleness, but deliberately and cleared eyed all the same, not any kind of naivete. She and Rains Fall, even Hamish, seemed to take such strength from knowing what their place was in things despite all the bad. “How are you doing, Mr. Mor--Griffith?” He heard a sort of amusement in her voice at his new name.

“Might survive, just about. All the rest ain’t doing what little brains I have many favors, I’m afraid. But at least,” he gestured to the bandana, “I’m used to covering up my face to mark me for a dangerous man who could kill you.” Though he felt curiously vulnerable, almost naked, without his guns all the same. He couldn’t help an awkward grin, even knowing she couldn’t see it. “Must be a lucky fella. Constantly looking like the bad ol’ bandit I am, and you’re the first to look twice.”

“Well, I’m not sure many people are looking for a dead man. According to what I read in the Nuevo Paraiso Herald, you died in a blaze of gunfire and curses several weeks ago facing down Pinkerton agents.”

He managed a low, dark chuckle at that, leaning forward to rest his arms on his knees. His lungs gave a bit of a grouchy hitch. “Reporters are a different breed of con men and liars, that’s all. Anyway, I’m sure Death’s gotta be a woman, Sister, cause seems even she won’t have me.”

He meant it to be funny, glib, turn aside the awkwardness by it. But he saw the grave look on her face, and it got through his thick skull that she’d read that ridiculously overwrought article, truly thought he died, and she’d been saddened by it. He felt that funny feeling in his chest again at that, mingled guilt and hope. “What actually happened?” she finally asked, settling down a bit more, hands folded in her lap.

He’d already told her far too much at the train station. No point in holding back now. She knew who and what he was. “Been trying as much I could to get folk to leave, save themselves. I came back to deal with the man who’d spun the whole thing out of control. Always trying to make it more ruthless, more violent, and it worked. Our leader got to the point he’d only listen to him. And then I find out he’d sold us out to save his own skin besides. Pinkertons came in. We ran, this one fella and me. Pinkertons and our former friends both chasing us. And--John, he has a wife,” because Abigail was that in truth if not by law, and not like a man on the run could easily do much of _anything_ involving the law, including truly give a woman his name, “and a little boy. I was pretty much done. Couldn’t keep going, and it felt like the best thing I could do yet was buy him time to get away, go to them. Told him to live a good life, to leave all of this far behind him. That it would...make me happy, knowing I done that for them.” 

He couldn’t ever have any of those good things for himself, but at least knowing John had made it, that Abigail and Jack were safe and happy, that would have been enough. Besides, looking out for his little brother, that was what an older brother did, right? It felt right, fitted neatly into some of those dark and jagged gaps inside his heart and soul, in a way that nothing had in so long. “Micah--the traitor--showed up. Attacked me. I couldn’t…” He shook his head, looking off to the east, still hating the fact that Micah was out there somewhere, knowing it would cost more people in the end. “We fought. There just weren’t enough left in me to win. Not even enough to get to my feet one more time. So he, and my mentor, this man I’d called my father all these years, Goddamn blind fool as I was? They both walked away and left me there.”

He felt the light touch of her hand on his arm, like an anchor keeping him from drifting away into all that pain and anger and sadness. He managed a deep breath at that, and kept going. “I think...even if I’d been able to get up, that would have finished me anyway.” Dutch had hesitated enough to turn away from Micah, true, but seeing him walk away and leave him there to die, and die alone, had broken what was left of his heart. One last tiny spark of hope finally guttered out. He’d truly _wanted_ to die in that moment, somehow both calm and forlorn all at once.

“You saw him for what he truly was. And yet, here you are, and I don’t think you walked away.” Calderón’s voice was thoughtful, gentle. “So he failed you, for all those years, and then at the end. But someone else didn’t.”

“No. The woman who’s here with me--Sadie--she came back. Figured to bury me, and found me just about fit for it, but not quite yet. She kept me alive, got me all the way here.” He found himself smiling a bit again. “You’d probably like her. She’s had a hell of a year, watched a bunch of bandits kill her husband. But she’s tough as nails, and kind on top of that.” The kind of person who’d done some hard things since, but that couldn’t carve that essential goodness out of her. 

Calderón nodded at that, turned a bit more to better face him. “After all of that, here you are. A great deal of time on your hands, and you seem like a man who can’t help but think about things little too much.”

“Me, Sister? I never was much of a thinking man.” She shot him a sharp, stern glance that reminded him a bit of Susan, who’d always had a way of making him feel like a little boy guiltily caught out with just a look. 

“I don’t believe that for a moment. So, how are you feeling?” 

Now he understood her well enough. She wasn’t politely asking after his health. He looked down at his hands. She’d asked, hadn’t she? She’d been the one who helped make sense of things before, turned his path into something clear enough. “I...” How was he feeling? Feeling too many things, and that was the truth. “I was ready to go. To make what I could of my dying, do something finer by it than all my living. I did some good things in the end, I tried, and maybe I was almost good, for a little while. But that’s a standard I can’t keep, for years and years. And I’ll look at what I done for one month of my life and know that was the best of me, and I ain’t never gonna be anything close to that again. Because decent folk died, and I didn’t, and that means I’ve got to live and make something of myself. But I don’t know there’s anything in me that can do that.” 

She sighed, soft and low. “You worry so much about who you are.”

“Seems that’s been my whole life. Being one poor foolish bastard who never could figure who and what he was. So how am I feeling? Guess I’m still afraid.” He could admit that to her, at least. He couldn’t say it to Sadie, or any of it, and sound so ungrateful for everything she’d done for him. “Afraid of living one long useless life with my eyes opened now, knowing what I can’t never be. Because there ain’t no turning shit into gold, Sister.”

The kitten, curious as ever, toddled her way across his lap to go to her, settling in, and Calderón reached down, stroking her. Smart move by the cat to go to her instead of him. “Do you know, Mr. Griffith, this is only my second assignment since I took my vows. I spent over twenty years serving St. Denis Parish. I saw so many children in need in all those years. Abandoned. Alone. Afraid. Angry. A lot of them died young. Most of the girls learned that the only worth they had was the price that someone would pay for their bodies, either as a prostitute or perhaps as a maid. The boys? So many lost, scared, angry boys who became lost, scared, angry men. Some I’d see in a prison wagon headed for Sisika. Some I saw hanged in Guiteau Square. Some died in fights with lawmen. I never saw you, so you weren’t living on the streets of St. Denis. If I can ask another question, what city was it?” 

Now he could only turn to stare at her, stunned, like she’d pulled one of Trelawny’s magic tricks, produced some secret of his with casual ease. Blurted out, “You always knew that?” But then it settled, and things focused. No wonder she’d been able to talk to him so easily, cut right through to what mattered and have it make sense to him. Strangely enough, it rapidly changed from a moment of panic at being that exposed to something almost like a comfort. To not have to hide it, or struggle to explain, suddenly felt like a gift the more he thought about it, because he’d seen how she cared about those smart-mouthed sullen little bastards in St. Denis. Trying to help them, save them from themselves, and apparently she couldn’t quit that, even when the street brat in question was twenty years further down on the rocky road to hell.

A small, almost sad smile crossed her face. “As I said, I’ve seen plenty of orphaned children over the years.”

Something hurt at that for a moment, thinking it was written in him so obviously what a mess he was that she could see it. But then, he’d never been able to lie to himself on some things. Some of that terrified and furious pickpocket struggling to survive and knowing the only worth he had was in what he could do had always stayed with him. “San Francisco. I was eleven. Good at pickpocketing already, thanks to my daddy. The two leaders of the gang I ended up in found me there when I was fourteen.” 

“Yes, Dutch Van Der Linde and Hosea Matthews, wasn’t it?”

“You’re pretty well read on criminal gangs for a nun.”

She grinned mischievously at him, suddenly looking years younger. “It makes for terribly exciting reading, and we all need some excitement. Did your mentors teach you about some of the past gangs?” 

“Some of them, yeah. They had me learning about them when I was young. They was always saying we could learn lessons from them, both good and bad.” 

“Did you ever hear of the Tres Julios?”

It took him a second, but then he placed the reference. “Sure. We wasn’t folk who looked down on Mexicans, or Indians, or blacks, or any of that. One of the few real virtues we had, I guess. The Julios, that was...Texas and New Austin in the ‘’60’s and 70’s? Three fellas named Julio riding together, so that was how they got the name. Dutch admired them. Said they had sound ideals. Pushing back against white folks for all the crap they was doing to the Mexicans, and doing it with style.”

“We weren’t wrong that the injustice was there. Americans coming in, taking our land, beating and hanging our men, stealing our horses, raping our women, and knowing they could do it because the law would support them. But we made our anger into our excuse for any number of things.”

 _We_ , she said. Now he looked her over carefully. He’d seen pictures of a few of the Julios, but that was so long ago, given they’d been broken back around, what, ‘76? And he’d been more interested in the gang as a whole, and Dutch’s praise of them, than the specifics of its people. Seemed Sister Calderón had secrets of her own, showing her own cards to him now, and he couldn’t help but laugh, shaking his head. “So you was with them?”

“They called me Beatriz Lopez de Morales then. Julio Morales was my husband, and Julio del Toro and Julio Carillo were like my brothers. I was married at sixteen, riding as an outlaw by twenty. My mother was both appalled and proud.” There was a sudden roguish twinkle in her eyes. “Banks and stagecoaches were a bit easier to rob then, I suppose, but I was good at it.” 

“Well, how about that.” Two old reprobates sitting there together yarning about things, and suddenly for a moment, everything didn’t seem so terrible. He looked at her and for a moment, could imagine her younger, dark eyes flashing fire, brandishing a Winchester at some poor bank teller, proud and fearless. “Didn’t end so well for the Julios neither, though.” 

“No. We’d been on the run for almost a year, since Carillo was shot when we tried to rob a load of silver. The marshals cornered us near Durango in ‘76. Nacoma--del Toro’s wife--was Comanche, so it was her country. She knew some ways out of the canyons, so a few of us made it out with her leading the way. Most didn’t. My Julio didn’t. Nacoma’s Julio didn’t. My son, Manuel, was one of the first to die. Fifteen. He was a boy trying to be a man, on the wrong day.” She looked away at that, though not before he saw the old pain lingering there in her eyes.

He could imagine it all too well, even set in sun-baked southern canyons rather than the rolling tree-covered hills of Roanoke Ridge. The tension of being hunted hard for so long, the growing bickering and mistrust and then finally, one last explosive eruption of violence as the law closed in. This time, he was the one who reached out, putting an awkward hand on her shoulder. She reached out, put a hand over his for a moment, giving it an quick pat of acknowledgment, and then they both let go. “I’m sorry.” At least he hadn’t lost a wife and a child at Beaver Hollow.

“I don’t talk about it much.”

“I understand that.”

“Your son, did he--”

“No, that was all long before this. His momma and me, we was always kind enough towards one another. But it was one night of us being young, drunk, and stupid, that’s all. She raised Isaac mostly by herself, didn’t want him near my life. Smart woman. Eliza was her name. Eliza McCready. Lived out near Cheyenne.”

“What happened?”

“I come back to visit and find the graves. They’d been robbed and killed about a week before. Nine years ago this May. Isaac, he was just four.” He laughed to himself, short and sharp in a way that hurt like hell, but it felt like it should. “He looked so much like her. That boy, he got just about nothing of me. Her grey eyes, her dark hair, her name. Her life. And I was glad, you know? But they got caught by my life all the same. Me trying to do right by them with money I robbed from other folk, killing people as I was sometimes, don’t it make some kind of sense that the robbing and killing would come back on them? Amazing fool that I am, I didn’t take the warning. Nothing good comes from me, not really.” 

Eliza had the good sense to keep him at arms’ length. But it hadn’t been nearly enough. He wished she’d had enough sense to slam the door on him completely and tell him to go to hell, that the boy was hers alone and none of his. He wished he hadn’t been young and stupid to begin. He wished he hadn’t been tipsy enough already to be brave enough to talk to her that night. He wished Eliza hadn’t been lonely herself and taken him up on the drinks he’d bought her. He wished he’d been sweeter to her that night than he probably had, gone to her bed for the fine woman she was rather than as a sad whiskey-sodden longing for the girl he could never have. 

He wished a hell of a lot of things, a whole weight of so many years and so many acts to regret still there. The trouble was that there was no mending any of it that he could see. “I think you’re very hard on yourself.”

He felt something in him slip its leash, running out of control, something all wild and angry and terrified. Was she trying to offer him absolution? As if he could stand that. “Am I, Sister? Am I really? You know how many folks I’ve killed in the last six months while it all went to shit? More than I killed in the twenty years before. No question some of them was bad men, worse than me, men who deserved it so they'd stop hurting decent folk, but my God, most of them _was_ probably just decent folk seeing us maniacs shooting up their town and trying to put a stop to it. That TB I got? Right before I beat the hell out of him, I told that man it didn't matter what he had to do to get the money for his debt. ‘Sell your wife, sell your son if you have to, I don’t care’, I said to him, ‘but you owe and it’s gonna get paid’. I cursed them two, I swear. Wife ends up selling herself on the streets, kid selling himself to working the Annesburg mines. And when I seen that, I tried to help them, to make amends, but the damage, it’s done. It’s done. I can’t bring that man back. I can’t give that boy back his father. I can’t give that woman back her husband and her pride. And that’s only one family I ruined. Working as the collections man for this little Austrian weasel of a usurer, I was, and hating myself for it all the time, hounding desperate people just trying to get by, but I didn’t see it then--there are debts in this life that ain’t never getting paid. Because some things, some sins, you just can’t make right. There’s so much that’s good in this world, Sister, good people in it, but there ain’t much goodness in me. I want there to be, but...”

He couldn’t help but be thankful that she took that in sober silence, thinking it over, rather than firing right back with some kind of protest. All she said, finally, was one question. “Do you want to be saved, Arthur?” 

He noticed her using his name, and the solemn weight of that hit hard. Besides, it was too big a question, so he deflected it, not looking at her, looking over over the edge of the rooftop to the rolling ridges of the pale desert sands beyond. He hadn’t ever read the Bible. Swanson was the only one in camp with any real use for one. He’d figured it was best to skip a book that told him what he already knew full well--he was damned. “I ain’t much of a one for God, Sister.”

“I didn’t mean religiously.”

“I told you, there’s not much in me worth keeping around.”

“I didn’t ask whether you thought you deserved to be saved either. None of us deserve it. We all sin. We all hurt people. We all have hate and anger.” She got one hand on his shoulder, the other reaching up and tugging down the kerchief from his face, pulling it back down around his neck. Her hand touched his cheek, palm warm and callused, and he almost flinched back from it, her so casually touching him like this, given the clinic’s fairly strict rules about contagion. She looked him right in the eyes. “Do you _want_ to be saved?” 

In that moment he felt an echo of that same power Dutch had woven into his words, the power of conviction. This little brown-skinned woman, former bandit queen and current nun, fighting for street brats, somehow didn’t want to let him go that easily. Not a question of deserving, only of wanting, and if he could be honest with himself, in his tired and aching heart, wasn’t this all he’d ever wanted? Someone to reach out and say there was some way out of the nightmare. He’d thought he’d had that in San Francisco those long years gone, but had he been just Dutch’s best and most versatile tool all along? It felt that way. “Yeah.” He barely managed it above a whisper, and then it was all too much, and everything overwhelmed him.

All the running, the fighting, the killing, the doubts and self-loathing, the graves dug and people he’d loved left buried for the empty and grandiose dreams of a man who’d set himself up as their own personal messiah. Finding the lost, the angry, the lonely, binding them with gilded words and empty promises. He’d been fourteen, desperate and scared and so willing to believe in any way out of barely scraping by, and he pitied that poor sad boy who fell for it so utterly for all these years. So many lives lost or destroyed, all for nothing. 

Face in his hands, trying to get hold of his unruly emotions and hide a few sudden helpless tears from her, he didn’t realize he’d lost it totally all the way to rough and painful choked sobs until he felt Calderón’s arm around his shoulders, holding on tight. Felt that damn silly kitten had come back onto his lap and was purring, trying her best to cheer him up, and he couldn’t help but laugh at that, some sweet little innocent thing trying to be kind to him. Then it was all a big Goddamn helpless mess of laughing, crying, coughing all at once, but he couldn’t stop, not for anything. Hosea, Lenny, Sean, Kieran, Molly, Susan, Jenny, Mac, Davey, Eagle Flies, Eliza, Isaac, his ma, the man he’d thought Dutch was, all the things he wished so much he could have been, all the lives he’d taken, all the lives he’d damaged or destroyed, a lifetime’s worth of all kinds of grief now all rolling up out of him at once. He’d learned young not to cry, that all it got him was ridicule at best, a beating at worst. But much of a bitch as it was on his aching lungs, it lessened the ache in his heart a lot, as if he’d been carrying all of it around for so long that he couldn’t even imagine what it was like to let go of any of it. It was still there, but it was like the wound had been lanced and a lot of the poison let out.

As he finally got it under control again, she patted him on the shoulder. “I shouldn’t be surprised you can’t be kind to yourself. The world never showed you that you were worth being kind to, I suppose.” He sat there, fingers sunk into the kitten’s plush fur, willing to listen, at least. “I felt the same, you know,” she told him finally. “How much I hated myself after Durango. How much I believed I deserved all this pain. How I dwelled on everything bad that I’d done. It led me to God eventually, and to the children who needed me. I couldn’t help my Manuel, but I could help other children who needed love and kindness. I found my path. I have to believe you’ll find yours.”

It all sounded pretty, and he wanted to believe it, but he couldn’t help the wariness in him. “Not sure what that might be. Fighting and riding and shooting and killing, that’s about all I’m good for.”

“I’d bet there’s more to you than that.”

“We’ll see.”

“You know, I read in the newspaper that Arthur Morgan is dead. That seems to be true. Beatriz Lopez de Morales died in Durango Canyon. We take another name when our life changes, and we become someone new, don’t we? Women do it on marrying. You take a new name on swearing religious vows.”

He nodded, acknowledging the truth of that, sensing where she was going. “The Wapiti and other tribes do it on some big event or act in their life.”

“So, you have to ask yourself now: 'who do I want Arthur Griffith to be'?”

“Well, if I could answer that question, things would be a hell of a lot easier. TB aside, I ain’t some young buck with all the time in the world.”

“It’s not easy to begin again. I was a child when I married Julio, and his path became my life, and then I was thirty-two when that life was destroyed. I was so afraid I was too old, too damaged to make a life of my own. You were a child when Dutch Van Der Linde found you, and you’ve been what he made you. But it’s not too late.”

So she did understand it. She went on, “Jesus redeems our sins in the end, but here on earth, I think we still have to choose to redeem ourselves where we can. So you’ll save yourself. Choose every day the kind of man you want to be. And I’ve seen you choosing goodness, and love. Believe in the world, and in people, but you must also believe in yourself.”

Swanson had sobbed, by the side of those railroad tracks, _Oh, how I wish I was different._ That hit home, all right, prodding that painful place within him that had always longed for something different. He’d owed so much to Dutch and Hosea that he could never have left, not for Eliza and Isaac, not for anything. He’d fallen for a respectable girl, hadn’t he, been so fixated on her these last sixteen years that no other woman could ever replace her? That said something. He’d wanted to be different. Maybe he could be, and it actually helped to have her say so bluntly that it wasn’t some magical, immediate thing. It was going to be hard work, much like dealing with the TB. But...maybe. Maybe there was some hope, and some actual direction now.

Still, the weight of having his own life in his hands felt both like a blessing and a curse. Whatever happened now, it was of his own making. But she told him he needed to believe in himself, and that was some trouble. “Easier said than done, Sister.” 

“Oh, you’re on your way. You believe in love now. You’ve tried to give of yourself for those who needed you. You tried to lay down your life for those you love. You’re loved yourself.”

He put up a hand to stop her at that. “Don’t go crazy on me, now. Ain’t nobody who loves me like that.” Mary made sure to tell him unequivocally that this time it was over. He couldn’t blame her for it. She’d been right, as painful as she obviously found it to write that thing.

“What about the woman who brought you here?”

He could only stare at her. “Yeah, we was claiming to be married because it let us travel without folk giving it much thought, but my God, it ain’t like that between us! Sadie, she’s a decent woman, and she just lost her husband besides.”

“I doubt it was ‘like that’ between you and the man you tried to die for either,” and now she really was poking fun at him but that was all right, “because there’s more than one kind of love. She loved you enough to come look for your body to bury you. When she found you alive, she did her best to keep you that way and get you here. I imagine there were others who helped you along the way. You _are_ loved, even if you couldn’t see it.”

He might not be the brightest, but eventually he figured out when to shut up and listen to someone with a vast advantage of knowledge and good sense. “Maybe. I don’t know.” Maybe she was right. Dutch, that was a subject he couldn’t approach yet. But Hosea--Hosea had cared, hadn’t he?

She pressed his hand with her shoulder one more time, and pushed up to her feet. “You should rest. You’ve been sitting up longer than Dr. Garcia would probably like.” She smiled at him. “But it’s always good to talk with you, Mr. Griffith. I’m not due to leave on another journey of the circuit for a few months, so I hope we can keep talking.’

“I...wouldn’t mind that.” She seemed to help make sense of things that felt too big to wrestle, and if this was his life now, all his responsibility, he’d better take what help he could get from someone he could trust.

She left him there stretching out on the cot again, resting his now-aching lungs, the kitten stubbornly sticking with him. A lot of thoughts were a whirlwind in his mind, but for once the weight of it all seemed balanced by the possibilities.

~~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
Well, well. Maybe that notion of an old roughed-up bandit becoming all religious ain’t so crazy after all. But somehow I don’t think that’s a path that would bring me much peace. What path will, that I shall have to figure out. I lived Dutch’s dream, or maybe his NIGHTMARE, since I was a kid. Ranching is Johnny’s dream, or maybe Abigail’s. My dreams? I don’t know yet.

Hell. That’s not true. I know one dream I always had. A wife, a family. But even if I maybe get to being someone a good woman could look at twice, and I don’t mean only to stare in horror, it don’t do to get your hopes up too much. Start smaller than that, I suppose. Maybe I’ll dream first of being well enough to ride again. This is a beautiful country, even if I only see it from the rooftop. Going to Chuparosa market and finding Teodora Mendoza selling them odd pitaya fruits again, buying some with honest money that don’t come with innocent blood shed. 

It’s a strange notion, thinking that at last my life is my own, when I always thought it was mine. Living outlaw life, wild and free, wasn’t that what we told ourselves? All that ever meant anything to me was loyalty and right now all that I was loyal to is gone. Maybe she aims to say I need to be true to myself for once. 

There’s some sense in that. I’m glad some folks around me have sense, and they can talk me around on it, because I’m not very good at that. I never have been. 

( **Sketch of the black kitten** , captioned: “Seems I have made a new friend. She come up to me with no apologies and made herself right at home. From what I’m told, a cat don’t take back claiming you, so that’s that. Confident as a queen, so I think I’ll call her Dido.")


	7. Las Hermanas: O Come All Ye Of Little Faith

She’d slipped out while Arthur was still sleeping, riding out from Las Hermanas to the tone of the bells and the soft sound of singing from the chapel. Christmas morning service--she’d made the apologetic excuse that she didn’t want to attend services on an important occasion like this without her bedridden husband, and she’d instead do her own part of appreciating Jesus by trying to feed folks. Not five thousand of them, and not loaves and fishes either, but she’d gone hunting for Christmas dinner. 

They had to notice she didn’t attend any services on Sunday or otherwise anyway, husband excuse or no, but nobody said anything, and she appreciated that. Aside from the rule to keep their hands--or intimate parts, more accurately--to themselves, the convent really wasn’t that strict about much of anything about expectations of behavior. Well, not going crazy and shooting up the place felt pretty much implied, but given she’d expected pretty strict regimentation and lectures about sin and guilt, it was nice to not see it. Whatever regimentation they had was actually Garcia’s fairly strict hand in looking out for his patients.

So a’hunting she’d gone--no Baby Bunting involved, though. Three fat jackrabbits and a mallard duck already to show for it, but now here, looking down from the ridge, was a real prize. A doe mule deer feeding, head lowered, and she carefully unslung the repeater from her shoulder. Lined up the shot, and whistled to catch the deer’s attention, make it lift its head. One clean shot, and there it was, dropped right where it had been.

Field dressing was bloody, messy work, but far easier than trying to sling the whole carcass over Bob’s back, and there was something unseemly about the notion of butchering in a convent anyway, to her mind. She might have wandered far, far from that path but she still respected something of the idea that getting a religious house all bloodstained sat oddly, and should. Wasn’t completely blood free at Las Hermanas--TB patients with their raw, lacerated lungs, and a whole bunch of women with their monthly cycle, which had to make the nuns handling laundry have a real fun time with bloodstained drawers--but that wasn’t death and violence. It felt different. 

She should head back soon, given raw meat would spoil in a hurry in this kind of warm weather, and the folks in the kitchen would want to get going on the meal. But she let herself sit and have her lunch out here in the quiet of the desert. Not much--an orange, a chunk of bread, some cheese, washed down with water from her canteen, scrubbing her hands down with some water and some desert sand which she was at it. Christmas dinner would be big enough to make up for the light meal now. Bob got a sugar cube and some hay for his troubles.

Sitting there on a rock, enjoying the sun, she dug through her satchel for a peppermint. Her fingers brushed the harmonica, its distinct shape in the pocket she’d sewn it on the inside of the satchel making it easy to pick out. She hesitated, as she always did, but pulled it out. She was alone. It was fine to do this. She’d felt like a fool letting it slip to Arthur on that wagon ride that she’d played, and he must have heard something in her tone about it, because that sweet fool made it a point to find her a harmonica. Handed it over, made some remark about looking forward to hearing her play, and surprisingly, hadn’t gotten pissed when she met that gift by effectively telling him she’d never play for him, or anyone else for that matter. 

But she couldn’t. It was something that belonged to her old self, belonged to Jake, and she couldn’t hand that over. Not when so much had been taken from her. But it was all right to play alone like this, trusting that a good soul like Jake had of course gone straight to heaven, so he could hear her play for him still. 

So she pulled the harmonica from its pocket, put it to her lips, and played. “Silent Night,” one of Jake’s favorites. She could still remember him singing all loud and joyful way back when they were kids together in the Tumbleweed church, Uncle Will preaching about miracles and hope and joy. Singing it in that same church after he grew to manhood. Singing it last Christmas in the cabin while she played the tunes for him because that was the one time of year he’d let himself let loose and sing. 

_”We both know I can’t carry a tune in a bucket, Sadie girl. It’s you as got all the gifts with music. Christmas? That’s my one exception. Especially up here where we got no church but walking out in God’s own creation, might as well sing for that.” He gave a sheepish shrug of his shoulders, throwing another log on the fire. “Besides, there’s some bit in every man who never wants to disappoint his daddy, no matter how old he gets.”_

_“Ain’t you such a good little preacher’s boy,” she teased him right back, laughing._

_He’d looked at her with a knowing smile, a gleam in those bright blue eyes that she recognized. “Got you praying real hard last night, to judge from how loudly you was calling out to God.”_

_“Jake Adler!” She felt the blush rising in her cheeks in spite of herself. But she’d been laughing even as she gave a shove to his shoulder. “Shut up and come help me with the biscuits, then.”_

She’d loved that man so much. She’d loved that life so much. Being honest now, she could admit that both of them realized soon after they got there how much they missed being a part of something bigger. They’d come from a community, even a dying one, and gone off on their own, and there was a part of them made lonely by living cut off from everything. But that was the price they’d paid for what felt like true freedom, and they had each other, so it was still mostly sweet. Joining the gang, that big boisterous family before it all fell apart, and even the quieter and more serene life at Las Hermanas, it felt nice to be a part of something again. But it still hurt because she and Jake hadn’t given up on their life in Pinetree Gulch to move south to be closer to more folks. They’d had it taken from them. 

She sat there a few more long moments, harmonica clenched in her first, lump in her throat, trying to fight down the tears. “Happy Christmas, Jake,” she said, barely able to manage more than a scratchy whisper, unable to hold back a few hot tears sliding their way down her cheek. _I miss you. I miss you so much. I miss the me that I was too._ Dashing the back of her hand across her eyes, she put the harmonica away, and headed for Bob.

Back at Las Hermanas, she dropped the meat off in the kitchen, thanked by a very grateful Sister Ursula, who set right to work with it. She went and washed up as best she could from one of the rain barrels. She’d have to change clothes before dinner all the same, given the traces of blood on her shirt cuffs and sleeves. 

Ended up helping Sister Juanita feeding the goats and chickens next. She didn’t know Juanita all that well yet, but she seemed like the sort with good humor, making jokes, singing to herself as she worked. Standing at the fence, strewing chicken feed, she turned to the black-clad woman at her side. “Don’t mean nothing bad by it, but I noticed you ain’t much like the contemplative religious type. How’d you end up here?” 

“There’s all types among the nuns, _Señora_ Griffith,” Juanita said. “Did you expect us to all be prune-faced and disapproving?”

“No.” Juanita quirked an eyebrow, obviously calling out the lie, and Sadie felt strangely like when Uncle William used to give her that knowing look. “Well, OK, maybe.”

Juanita laughed at that, grabbing the sack of goat feed and heading for the goat pens, Sadie following her with the bucket of kitchen scraps Ursula always got together, all the peelings and trimmings and whatnot. “The first Spanish lesson Pedro and I came to give him, that husband of yours looked like he expected me to drag him to hell on sight.”

Somehow she didn’t doubt that. “He’s been through a lot, the TB and all. Guess it makes him react odd to some things.” It wasn’t like she could say that he was an ex-outlaw who’d had a five thousand dollar federal bounty on his head, and still couldn’t accept the idea he actually wasn’t a mean bastard damned to hell.

“Of course. Anyway, you had asked. I was sent here when I was eleven. My parents were _campesinos_. Didn’t have money for two boys, and then three girls and their dowries. I was the youngest, so I was gifted to the Church as a novice.”

“ _Gifted_?” She shook her head, incredulous. “You ain’t serious? Folk can’t just...donate a kid like a sack of cornmeal.” That wasn’t much different than slavery, in her opinion. “Can they?”

Juanita’s shoulders gave a small dip and shrug as she poured the feed into the goats’ trough, indicating for Sadie to pass her the bucket, pitching that in too. “You and Arthur sound like you grew up right across the border. But some things are different in Mexico. You’ll learn that. It wasn’t so bad. I took the vows in the end as my choice. I was grateful to the Church for caring for me. They meant that I had a home. A safe place to sleep. Food and an education I wouldn’t have had otherwise. They gave me a life with dignity and purpose.”

Sadie thought she heard a faint thread of wistfulness in Juanita’s voice all the same, but decided it would be rude to press it just now. “I see.” Taking back the bucket, she put it back in its place outside the kitchen door, reached down to scritch a ginger-furred cat rubbing against her legs, and headed inside, the cool shade of the adobe helping against the ferocious midday sun.

Upstairs, she paused at the door and knocked lightly enough that if he were dozing he’d likely sleep through it, but if he was awake, he’d hear. God knew Arthur couldn’t really get up to much craziness anyway, but not just barging in felt like a small courtesy. Pushing open the door, she saw he was awake, reading as usual, Dido snuggled in by his side. The kitten seemingly adopted him a few weeks ago, moved right in, and made herself at home. She was fine with that. She and Jake had planned to get another pup in the spring after Hannah died late in the fall, a stray they’d found in the woods right after their first snowfall up in the mountains. She’d been old even then, but she’d been such a good dog. She wondered now if they’d had a dog still with them that night if they wouldn’t have been caught by surprise. It didn’t matter. Six O’Driscolls against her and Jake--she could handle those odds now, no problem, but she was a far different woman from the one she’d been back in May.

Anyway, when it came to Dido, it felt nice to be able to give something small and cute a cuddle. Honestly, she felt better that he had some company during the long hours he was stuck in bed and she was busy doing things. “What’s the reading?” She nodded towards the impressively thick book propped on his chest. “Damn, you could kill someone with that, just about.” He closed the book, turning his attention to her with the eagerness of a man bored out of his considerably smart mind. Coming closer, she read the title. “‘Les Miserables’? You reading French now?”

He gave a wry smile. “Jesus, you rattle off that French like it weren’t nothing.”

“Read that one a couple years ago. Told the shopkeeper in Strawberry to give us the biggest novels he had. That were one of them. Where’d you get it?” She should have figured he’d have long since blazed through the books they’d brought with them, given little else to do right now aside from read, sleep, eat, and learn Spanish. 

He pushed up against the pillows a bit, not enough to be deemed sitting up and get yelled at by Garcia for it, but at least so he wasn’t flat on his back and could look at her. “I got it from Ramona Trujillo. We lungers, we got ourselves a nice little lending library out in the courtyard every Monday after breakfast.” She couldn’t help but note that nearly a month of constant rest now had done him a lot of good. He still looked much like he’d been dragged through hell backwards, but he coughed a lot less. He’d gained a little weight, the deepest shadows had faded from around his eyes, and those eyes themselves looked a bit clearer and brighter, shining right now with good humor. “I get some miserable French folk from her, swapped her ‘Oliver Twist’ and ‘Tale of Two Cities’ myself.”

She couldn’t help but smile in spite of herself. “Real nice, that is. You folk looking out for each other like that.” He nodded in reply, giving a brief hint of a smile. Dido woke up at that, green eyes peeping out of her soot-black fur, and padded over to the edge of the bed, giving a leisurely stretch, and hopping down to the floor. Heading out the door, and she almost felt the sheer longing intensity of Arthur’s eyes watching her go, just like he watched Sadie go, every morning. This room with its two beds, one window, a table, and two nightstands, the courtyard with its cots and reclining chairs, the rooftop with the same, the latrine, bath once a week down in the room next to the kitchen--that was his life right now. 

She could understand it. She and Jake had about gone crazy sometimes over the winter, snowed in, world more or less shrunk to four walls of the cabin and a path dug to the barn. Used to New Austin and wide open spaces as she was, that claustrophobic feeling was new. Arthur had been a man who she’d seen could easily ride across two or three states to get a job done if need be. How much of a prisoner did he feel like right now, trapped not by the weather, but by his own body failing him? It must be hard to watch healthy people come and go as they pleased.

So she tried to cheer him up with a joke. “Couple hours till dinner. Quite the deluxe life you got here, got folk as would envy you! All your reading time, got your meals delivered up to you--your pillows need some fluffing too?”

Seeing the stricken look on his face, as if she’d slapped him, she cursed herself, realizing too late how she’d misjudged. “I ain’t lazy,” gruff words said in a soft, small voice, looking away from her to stare out the window. She saw how his fingers clenched, but anger in a big man was easy enough to pick out. That wasn’t it. There was more a jittery air of something more like fear here. “I’ll be back and helping out, soon as I can.”

She’d been there. Seen him riding in, often past dark, dropping off things to Pearson, dropping cash or stuff in the camp’s donation box, dropping onto his cot for a few hours of sleep, grabbing some stew or coffee, talking to people for a little while, then usually riding back out again by noon. If he stayed a day or two to rest, spent time with people in camp and relax a little, Dutch got all over his ass, telling him to go do something, go be a “man of action”. She hadn’t questioned it then, caught up in her own business. She wished she had. She’d watched him haranguing an already-tired Arthur to do even more of the heavy lifting, all the while sitting on his ass reading his books, and Dutch sure as shit didn’t have TB as an excuse for being a man of such leisure. 

She had the sad, angry suspicion that was the way it had been for years and years. _Just how much did that man make you think all the worth you got is in the things you can do for folks?_ But she’d hurt him, even unknowingly, and she carefully tried to pick her way through it and somehow take the sting from her mistake, feeling stupidly on the edge of tears again. “Of course you ain’t lazy,” she told him. “Nobody seeing how much you done for everyone in that camp could believe that for a second.” She sat down carefully on the edge of the bed. “But you gotta take time to rest, Arthur. Your job is getting better. We’ll be fine here without you hauling flour sacks for six months, or whatever that takes. But if you let this kill you by pushing too hard too soon, then I assure you, I _ain’t_ gonna be fine.”

It felt like the wrong hook still, somehow, to tell him she needed him to do it for her, rather than because he simply deserved to take the time he needed to recover, but she couldn’t see yet how to get that through to him, and make him believe it. But it wasn’t wrong to say it either. Whenever it had been he’d become such a part of her life, she couldn’t say for sure, but she’d caught a glimpse of what his absence was like when she’d thought him dead on that mountain, and she wasn’t sure she could bear it. 

He gave a small nod at that, and looked back at her. The moment passed. “All right, then. If that’s what you need.” Stretching an arm out past her, he grabbed something off the nightstand, handing it to her. “Here. Ain’t much, but then, I ain’t got much to call my own right now. All my stuff’s with John, wherever the hell he is by now.” He held up a hand, index finger up in warning. “I implore you, do _not_ say ‘Tahiti’. But--Merry Christmas, anyway.”

She unrolled the sheet of paper, seeing the pencil sketch there. Herself, with Dido snuggled up against her shoulder. That had been just last night. Dido had been purring up a storm, and she’d been laughing at it. She hadn’t known she’d been smiling like that. She hadn’t known she could still smile like that. “You done this?” Stupid question. Wasn’t like anyone else was there to see that, and they’d all seen him writing and sketching in that journal of his. But nobody ever saw any of it. He must have remembered that scene from last night clearly enough to draw it this morning. “This is…you’ve got a real gift for it. Thank you.” He gave one of those little smiles of his, and seeing the way he’d captured her look, she wondered what he’d look like if he let himself truly smile. She rolled it back up carefully. “Shit, I ain’t got nothing for you though.”

He gave a snort of amusement. “You saved my life, Sadie. Ain’t a much bigger gift than that. Pretty sure that covers any and all gifts for the rest of time.”

“Yeah, well, you saved mine, so--” She had that little pink flower in its jar, putting it on a spot on the roof to try to make sure it survived, making sure it got sun and water, not wanting Arthur to see if it died. He had enough on his mind with his own struggle to survive. But it had flourished again, so she'd brought it down here today to give it to him, seeing it was OK and thinking it would cheer him up. Though she'd forgotten about the bag shoved underneath her bed with the rest of his stuff, buried under heavier clothing from Wapiti. Yeah, things had been busy, but no real excuse for that. “Hold on.” She got off his bed, digging under her own cot, finding the bag. Coming back, she handed it to him. “Still not sure it’s much of a gift giving you your own stuff. But it’s what I got. Sorry I forgot about it.” She fished in the drawer and plucked out the flower in its jar, where she'd put it this morning while he was sleeping.

Brows furrowed in confusion, he took the jar in his hand, looking it over carefully. She heard him take in a swift breath of recognition. “How you managed--”

“I went to camp first, in case John got it wrong and you’d come on back there in the end. Place was on fire--Pinkertons must have torched it. But I got some of my things. Some of yours. I...” She swallowed, hard. She didn’t want to say it, but better to be honest than have him think she’d done some kind of creepy stealing of his things the minute he was dead. “I weren’t of a mind towards keeping any of it. Not why I took it. I would have…once I found you...”

He said it for her, for which she was eternally grateful. “I see. You was gonna bury my stuff with me.” He opened the bag next and started unpacking, pulling out the horseshoe, then the pictures. She’d only glanced at them, in a hurry as she was, but now she looked closer as he laid them out on the bed. The dog--obviously a beloved pet. Himself as a fresh-faced kid, maybe eighteen, with Hosea, younger and stronger, and Dutch. A man--his father, from the name “Lyle Morgan”, and him wearing a familiar hat, obviously an arrest photo. A woman, probably his mother? 

Her curiosity sparked at that, and she wondered if she could press, albeit gently. But he, and apparently Sister Calderon who he’d known from St. Denis and who’d been some kind of bandit herself in her youth, were the only ones where she could safely talk about all of it. “Seems like you and me run off to get married in a big old rush, Mr. Griffith. I know I can trust you with my life, and I know your preference in guns, but honestly, I don’t even know how old you are.”

Propping himself up better against the pillows, he eyed her, but with something like quiet amusement, not suspicion. “We do seem to have skipped that whole stage of things. I’m thirty-six. Born on July 3rd of ‘63.”

That was the first tentative crack of the door, so she’d keep at it. “Me, I was born in ‘68. So I’ll be thirty-two, come April 23rd.”

“Well, least you didn’t have to spend your birthday this year with us miscreants.” He meant it as a joke, but come April 23rd next year, she’d be without Jake all the same, and in some ways, she’d as soon have gotten that first birthday without him out of the way earlier. He’d kept her present hidden all winter--new ankle boots, pretty black-and-white leather with a row of shiny black buttons. Impractical for their day-to-day life, but she’d adored him for buying them, for giving her something pretty to wear here and there. He must have seen her wistfully looking at them at Chip’s store in Strawberry the fall before.

“Yeah, well, you probably didn’t even have anyone remember your birthday.”

He gave a dismissive half-shrug. “I was out hunting in Ambarino for, what, four days around then? So there was more important things for me to worry about. Besides, you get past thirty, it all kinda gets depressing, don’t it?”

“Not if you’re with folk who care about you.”

“Hosea did give me a book when I got back. Said he wished I’d get the time to read it.”

That sounded like Hosea, all right. “You sound New Austin like me, but you wasn’t out near Tumbleweed. Hosea said they found you about twenty years back, but I’d have remembered you before that.”

“Tumbleweed gal, huh? Nah. We was near Armadillo when I was little.”

“Armadillo? Oh, you bastard. Your town got the railroad that done killed Tumbleweed.” But she said it playfully all the same, not meaning it to start a fight. 

“Hey, don’t go blaming me, we up and left Armadillo when I was only six, just about.”

“Still picked up the accent pretty good for leaving that young, huh?”

Something within him went strangely still at that. He sighed, reaching up and rubbing his chin in a nervous-looking gesture. “Yeah, I had reason. Even that little, I knew it was better than sounding like my momma and daddy. Truth? I wasn’t born in Armadillo. Not even in America. We come over from Wales when I was two. I was born there, in the Rhondda Valley. Coal country, it was, where folk usually died young of black lung.” He gave her a bleak, wintery smile. “Something real funny about it. We leave all that behind when I ain’t even old enough to remember clearly, there I am not six weeks ago now, living in coal country with my lungs failing on me. Like that’s some damn Greek tragedy that was there waiting for me all this time.”

“Coincidence, that’s all,” she told him, knowing full well by now he was a man who’d let things haunt him, given half a chance. “Ain’t nothing of some kind of divine retribution about that. Me, I was born in America, but we moved when I was about a year old from Hanover--south part of Pennsylvania. Went to Tumbleweed. Bad call in the end, but back in ‘69, guess it sounded promising. And Welsh, that’s not so bad. ‘Griffith’ is Welsh, you know.”

“I know. That you trying to give me a last name like my real one? It was kind.”

“No. First thing that come to mind when that ticket agent asked.” At his confused look, she explained it more. “Griffith? That was _my_ name before I married Jake.”

He let out a loud bark of laughter at that, which turned into a few short, sharp coughs, and he stuffed his fist over his mouth to stifle it. Held up a hand to tell her to stand off, that he had it, and she couldn’t help the relief that it didn’t turn into a total coughing fit like it probably would have weeks ago. “So I took on your name in marrying you? There’s a reverse of the normal order of business.”

“Well, you can have ‘Morgan’ back if your pride thinks it’s so unnatural.”

He gave her a lazy grin at that. “Oh, ain’t nothing about pride. I like Arthur Griffith just fine. Think he’ll be a much better man than Arthur Morgan ever was, or so I gotta hope. But good for you sticking to your guns and making me take your name. Them suffragettes would approve.”

She laughed, shaking her head. “It ain’t like you’re the only immigrant, but but yeah, given how some folk treat them, I suppose you was smart to make yourself sound pure American. It was my grandpa who come over from Wales. Sheep farmers, his folk was. Grandma Rosie come over from Scotland. They encouraged my daddy to sound American. But they had their accents, and he said a bit of the language here and there. Pretty sounding, it is. I didn’t know much of it, but I still remember Grandpa Owen calling Grandma Rosie _cariad_.”

“It’s pretty sounding, but which means it don’t do menacing very well,” he said dryly. “I remember my daddy robbing someone on the road in Oregon, and this fella, he said with a sing-songy accent like that, it was like getting held up by a vaudeville skit, and he could only take the gun in his face seriously.”

Given Lyle Morgan’s picture was obviously an arrest photograph, she wasn’t surprised to hear he’d been a robber himself, but Jesus, doing it in front of his son? He said it so casually, like it was no big thing, even amused at the comment about the accent. “You and your daddy were close?”

Something closed off in his expression in a hurry. “No. Bastard would have done the world a favor by dying sooner. He called my momma plenty of things, but _cariad_ wasn’t one of them. Big man, like me. Beat the shit out of me when she wasn’t quick enough to get in his way and focus on her instead. Mean bastard when the robbing didn’t go well, when the whiskey ran out, when the cards didn’t go his way, when her or me was too loud, too annoying, too in his way. Any damn reason at all, really. Beat her black and blue all the time, and her just a little thing. Died when I was seven, up in Oregon. I expect he had something to do with that.” He reached for the picture of the woman, tracing the frame gently with one finger, then nodded towards the flower in its jar, now sitting on his nightstand. “She loved them flowers. Succulent, I think it is? Said it was something ‘just for pretty’. I got no idea where she’s buried. So when Dutch and Hosea and Bessie and Susan and me got into Oregon when I was fifteen, I picked one for her and kept it. Kept losing them over the years in fires or wagon floods at river crossing or running ahead of the law or whatever, so I’d have to get another next time we was out that way.” 

She almost hated to ask, but somehow, given she’d gotten him talking, and that was a rare thing, she figured she’d try. “If you hate him so much, why was you keeping his picture, where you could see it every morning? And his hat, at that?”

“Because it did me good to remind myself of what he was. They took that picture two weeks before they hanged him in San Francisco for thieving horses.” She gazed down at the picture. December 7th, 1874. He’d been on his own at age eleven? Jesus, he might have worried that his life was a Greek tragedy, but maybe he wasn’t wrong on that. “Because I was a bad man, but I liked telling myself there was degrees of being bad. Daddy, he was a criminal. Never gave a shit for anyone but himself. A pretty mediocre criminal at that. We come to America because he was running from the law. Me, I kept telling myself I was an _outlaw_. That I might be breaking the law, but I stood for something, and I looked after my own. That picture? It reminded me there were lines I didn’t never want to cross, and I needed to be careful of them.” He let out a low sigh, looking at his father’s picture again. “And for all that--he still was my father. He gave me that hat last time I saw him. Told me I was on my own, and at least he’d given me a trade to survive by.”

“Trade?”

He gave another of those humorless smiles. “He put me to work learning pickpocketing a week after burying Momma. Said it was high time I learned something useful. Didn’t learn to read or write, since both of them were illiterate, and we was never settled down enough for me to go to school anyway before she died. But I did learn that. I’m grateful, in a way. He was a miserable piece of work, but what he taught me, that was the only thing kept me alive those next years in San Francisco, till Hosea and Dutch found me. And I suppose it was the only thing he had to teach me. So--maybe he did care, in some fashion. I don’t know. I never will know.”

A curious thing, feeling the desire to murder a man dead for twenty-five years. No wonder he’d turned out as he had. No wonder he’d come to being the good man he wanted to be so late. Nobody had given him any chance at all before that. Something within her ached for that poor little boy who’d seen all his chances slip through his fingers before he even had the opportunity for a choice. 

After that, her life seemed so easy, so safe, and it hit her with a stab of guilt again. He’d become what he had because the world had been nothing but unkind all his life, and when he had the chance, look who he’d chosen to be. She’d chosen to lower herself. He noticed the silence that had grown between them, because she should tell him about her life in return, but so much of it was entwined with Jake. “You didn’t never say much about Jake,” he observed, voice soft. “That you not wanting to talk about him, or thinking you can’t?”

Some of both, probably, but all the same, she felt like she owed him some honesty for him being willing to cut himself open like that for her curiosity. “I can’t remember a time he wasn’t there. Five years older, he was, so I looked up to him as an older brother when we was kids. That changed later, sure, but he was always there." And now he wasn't. "Our mommas, they was best friends. Our families went to New Austin together. His daddy was a preacher, became the preacher in the Tumbleweed church.”

She felt the touch of his hand on her wrist, just a moment to let her know he was there, then he took it back. “Sounds like you got your own Greek tragedy going. Married a preacher’s boy who you loved, and here you’re stuck pretending you’re married to a criminal’s boy you don’t. I’m...Jesus, what a mess.”

“Yeah.” She couldn’t come up with pretty words right then to make it better, to tell him that it was all right, because it really wasn’t. He was a good man, but he wasn’t Jake. It probably never would be all right. But the fact that he saw it and understood made her feel not so alone with the burden of it. 

“Well, anytime you meet a good fella you want to be with, you let me know. I’ll be happy to give you a divorce. Or an annulment. Or whatever the hell it needs when you’re two friends who wasn’t ever really married anyway. I ain’t a lawyer, so don’t ask me about the particulars.”

That helped, because awkward as the joke was, it still made her laugh, and that helped shut away the tears. “No, I think I’m done with love, Arthur.” Who she’d become was someone she could barely live with, Sadie Griffith who’d believed in God and Jesus and mercy and love, and this bloodsoaked and angry Sadie Adler who didn’t believe in much of anything aside from the need for a gun in her hand to keep herself from being just another victim of bastards ever again. So how the hell would she ever find someone who could love all that? And she didn’t need a marriage haunted by Jake’s ghost either. “But thank you, all the same. That’s sweet of you.”

“Sure. That’s me, all right. Sweet as peppermints.”

“I had an older brother, he died when a horse threw him. My younger sister Caroline--”

“Ah, Uncle Tacitus’ dear niece?”

“The very same. She run off with a fella to Oregon as quick as she could. She and I ain’t written in years. So she wasn’t around to help with anything. Jake’s folks were both dead by the time he was sixteen, so my folks took him in. We wasn’t in love then, too close to each other to see how it was changing, I guess. But once we figured that out, we was both sure. He asked me to marry him when I was twenty, and he was twenty-one. We had to wait, though. Couldn’t afford marrying, children, any of it. Tumbleweed was failing out, but we was trying to keep our farm going, and Jake’s folks’ place besides.”

“You was married in ‘96.” He’d obviously read the back of the picture frame, probably while he’d been searching the house while she cowered in the cellar, unsure of what was going on, and exactly what these new voices meant. He did the math almost instantly, and she saw the look of pained astonishment on his face. “Eight _years_ , you waited?”

She shut her eyes for a moment at the astonished tone in his voice. “Yeah.” He’d been worth the wait, but it had been so long, so frustrating, all the same, and then. “And only then because we finally given up on the land and left. Got married in Blackwater, searched the papers while we was there. Found an advertisement for cheap land in the northern Grizzlies. Figured we’d make our lives there, away from all of it. Government, railroads, all of it. So we headed up there, and well, the rest you know.” Though he’d never know much of it, all the memories she had of Jake and their time together. 

She dared to look at him then, wanting to see how he’d taken that. He looked calm, but sadness in his eyes. “I know he loved you, which means he was smart enough to know a good woman when he saw one. And I see how much you loved him, so he must have been one hell of a man.”

“I ain’t much of a good woman no more, Arthur, but thanks all the same.”

“In the spirit of Christmas, how about you just accept that notion, at least for today?” His green-blue eyes lit now with the warmth of humor, like sunlight dancing across the San Luis River. “Now, we can argue it tomorrow if you like. But hell, idea might grow on you if you let it.”

She found herself smiling all the same, reaching out and giving his shoulder a squeeze. “Fine, so long as you don’t argue me saying you’re being a good man. In the spirit of Christmas, and all.”

“Fair enough.”

~~~~~~~~~~~

**Sadie’s Journal**  
First Christmas without Jake. There will be a lot of these moments to come, I expect, where I want to turn and look for him there, and he'll never be there. Christmases, birthdays, anniversaries we'll never get to see together again. Our anniversary next year will be much worse than it was this year given I had so much to keep me busy in September.

Arthur is looking a bit better, at least, though this whole process is very hard on him. He's not used to this much lying around, that much is clear. Doesn't seem to believe he deserves to look after himself to get better either. He about panicked when he thought I was calling him lazy. Damn you, Dutch Van Der Linde, and what you done to that poor man! Damn Lyle Morgan too, by the sound of it. Damn that Mary that Abigail was telling me about too, who seems to have played him for years. Hosea loved him, sure enough, but I'm not sure he ever said it clear as day. I don't think he's ever had anyone tell him he's worth anything except what use they could make of him. That explains a whole lot, don't it. 

But at least I done something right to end the year by telling him that he needs to look after himself. Threw some guilt in there to make it stick which probably ain't right, but I guess I'm not doing much in the way of fine good deeds these days anyhow. 

( **Tune and lyrics in both Latin and English for “Adeste Fideles”/”O Come All Ye Faithful”.)**

Noted at the top, “Traditional Christmas carol, collected December 1899, from the nuns at Las Hermanas, Nuevo Paraiso, Mexico.” Personal note at the bottom: “Truly beautiful singing for Christmas here. But I wasn’t in that chapel to join in. I’m an outcast to all that now. Faith, in God anyway, is a thing I don’t see much use for anymore. Not after what happened to me, and to Jake. But there is some comfort all the same knowing that some beautiful things can’t be destroyed and will outlive all of us. Music is one of them. Maybe there’s faith in that, of a different kind.”


	8. Las Hermanas: Two Graves In Ambarino

The Christmas feast hit the spot for all of them, and it seemed like a needed bit of cheer for people who struggled so hard each day under the shadow of death. Even this next morning, Sadie saw some brighter eyes and easier smiles when going about her business. That business, seemed like it could be anything these days. Helping with the cooking, the laundry, the stables. Hauling water, hauling food. 

It might have chafed a bit, three months before she’d been boss of what was left of the gang, calling the shots, and keeping everyone as safe as she could. Six weeks ago, she’d still been running with the men, holding her own, riding with the gang. Now she was back to taking orders and doing stuff like washing laundry, including ample amounts of depressingly blood and pus stained handkerchiefs and linens, in boiling hot water and strong lye soap.

But it didn’t bother her that much. Yes, it being a convent meant there were more women, as there were a few men living here few staying with sick wives or kids, but mostly the men were TB patients of varying strength, all the way from clinging to life with their fingernails, to able bodied ones so near to getting their clearance to leave and go back to a mostly normal life. So that meant most of the rougher chores fell to the women, including her. A man recently off near-total bed rest might not be able to muck out a stall or haul a sack of coffee beans or water buckets, but he could hold his own on something like peeling spuds in the kitchen to earn his keep. From what she’d seen, most of them were surprisingly free of outraged manly pride about it, eager to pitch in, even on so-called “women’s work”, given they were bored out of their minds by the time they got off bed rest, and grateful for the care they’d had here while they were so helpless.

Having drawn from the well, she poured the buckets of water into the bath barrel in the bathing room next to the kitchen for Sister Lupe to draw upon. Glancing into the kitchen, she saw the kettle already on the iron stove, heating water, getting ready for whoever had their weekly baths scheduled today, a Thursday. Strict schedule on that--when there were probably close to forty people to consider in this place between nuns, a few charity orphan girls like Juanita had been, and the TB patients and their kin, there was almost no jumping turns on that. She and Arthur had been assigned Friday. Other days of the week than their bath day, folks could get warm water to wash up back in their rooms. They’d politely made their own schedule on that, Arthur and her. Sharing space they might be, but keeping some semblance of privacy between them helped. They’d both ignore the other one dressing in the morning, or undressing for bed at night. She’d wash up after he was out for the morning, busy getting Spanish lessons or reading. If it was a rare rainy day and he couldn’t go outdoors, he’d still disappear off somewhere. He took care of his own clean-up in the afternoon, after they ate, took the mid-day _siesta_ , and she headed back to chores.

Passing along the corridor, meaning to go find Sister Ursula and see if she needed more help, she saw Sisters Veronica and Abarca carrying a bundle wrapped in white sheets out from one of the first floor rooms. Struggling along the narrow adobe corridor, carefully avoiding the courtyard. She could see why. Thin and wasted away as their burden probably was, there was no mistaking something that general size and shape. Someone had died of their TB. She didn’t know whose room that had been--tried to think. If they’d been that bad off, chances were they’d been in bed since she and Arthur got here.

Instinctively she stepped up. “Do you need help with--” 

Abarca looked at her with big, sad dark eyes, shaking her head, carrying on. She heard a voice behind her. “We nuns handle everything with the dead, _Señora_ Griffith.” She turned, looking at the speaker coming out of the room the man--if she judged the height and build correctly--had died in. 

She recognized the nun, somewhere in her fifties. Had seen her talking with Arthur a few times these past couple of weeks when she’d walked by on some task or another. This was Sister Calderón, the one he’d told her he knew from before, from St. Denis. The one who’d apparently been some kind of bandit queen herself in a former life. _She’s a safe one to talk to, if you need. Good at making some sense of the whole crazy life we been living. Lost her boy to it. Lost her husband to it._ He’d given her a significant glance at that last remark.

She’d restrained herself from pointing out that Jacob George Adler hadn’t been any kind of outlaw himself, thank you very much, so he certainly hadn’t done anything to provoke getting murdered by a pack of sadistic savages calling themselves a gang. It wouldn’t do any good, would only let out a mere candle flame’s worth of heat from the inferno raging inside her. Plus it would hurt him, reminding him Jake had been no outlaw, when he was only trying to be kind. _What the hell is wrong with you? Turned so mean you’re ready to bite any hand put out towards you, whether it’s to hurt or to help?_

She couldn’t help a wry smile. “What, we normal folk ain’t holy enough to help carry and wash bodies and dig graves?” She’d fallen far from that path, so maybe they were right to reject the help. 

Sadie heard something sad and tired in her voice as she answered, closing the door behind her. “No. It has nothing to do with holiness. I’m sure you would help, as would others. But Dr. Garcia and Mother Super Miguela agreed--nuns only for preparations and burial. Patients and their families shouldn’t see someone else who’s died of tuberculosis. Their struggle is already terrible. They don’t need to be haunted by that sight making their fears all the more vivid. It’s also why we try to take them from their room at night, but Dr. Garcia let us know we’ll have another patient tomorrow morning already. So Sister Anita will have to clean and scrub this room in a hurry.”

She couldn’t argue that notion. Catching a glimpse of that sheet-wrapped bundle, a man by the size of it, that already seared the image into her mind. She already had to do her best to shut out the thought of someone coming to the room she slept in now, and someday carrying Arthur out like that, all wrapped in white linen. Thought about watching him struggle to breathe his last, or even waking up one morning to find that he’d never wake up again. That was all too easy to imagine, remembering him lying there on the cold stone of Bluestone Ridge, so terribly still. That turned into remembering Jake slumped there on the scuffed floorboards in a spreading pool of blood, his chest blown open by a shotgun blast, and that same awful stillness.

The specter of two graves in Ambarino mountains still haunted her soul. The one she hadn’t had to dig in the end but feared could have chased them here to Nuevo Paraiso all the same, and the one that others, Arthur included, had dug for her, and which she’d never seen.

She couldn’t save Jake. She’d done everything she could for Arthur, but she was helpless now against that fight. It was up to Garcia’s plan, and luck or God or both. Given how badly God had failed her in Pinetree Gulch, failed Jake who’d been a preacher’s boy all full of goodness and kindness to most everyone he met, she wasn’t putting much trust in any kind of divine favor these days.

She looked at Calderón, seeing the tiredness in the woman’s eyes and body. Maybe she wasn’t his family, but she’d known the dead man all the same, had helped care for him in his slow dying. “Did he...have anyone here?”

She shook her head. “He didn’t have family here. And he knew he wouldn’t survive when he got here in October. But he didn’t die alone. We took turns sitting with him. We always do for those that come here by themselves, when it’s clear the end is near.”

“That’s good.” 

“His name was Miguel Alvarez. He was fifty-three. From Juarez.” At Sadie’s questioning look, she explained, “You looked as though you wanted to know.” Sadie supposed she had. It made Miguel Alvarez something more than a sad nameless corpse who’d died after a hard struggle with his TB. “Mother Miguela is overseeing the burial preparations. I volunteered to go to Chuparosa for supplies. I was going to find Francesco Trujillo to come with me, get his mind off his wife, and yet, here you are. So, would you like to come to with me, Mrs. Griffith?” A spark of humor in her dark-circled eyes lit up her weary face. “I imagine the structured life in these walls isn’t easy for you now, and maybe you could use a break.” 

Sadie had the sneaking suspicion she meant to meddle somehow, but the chance to get out of this place for a few hours felt too enticing to pass up. “Sure.”

The wagon was already hitched, so she hopped on, grabbing the reins, starting them on the trail to Chuparosa. She felt herself waiting for it, and Calderón didn’t disappoint, taking only a few minutes until they were out on the road through the desert to pipe up. “I understand from your husband that you’re handy with a gun. I think the two of us should be able to protect ourselves from any danger.” 

Something in that gently playful tone grated. She kept her eyes fixed on the road, on the horses. “Maybe I gotta pretend all that at Las Hermanas, but no need right now. If you met him back in St. Denis, you sure as hell know Arthur ain’t my husband. And maybe you was some kind of outlaw yourself, but you don’t know me, and you don’t know my life.”

Calderón took that hard verbal swat as if it were her just waving a fly off in annoyance. “I don’t. But I know plenty about loss, and bitterness.”

“Do you? We was good people. I didn’t never want to hurt anyone before all of that. And he was a preacher’s boy, my Jakey. He believed in God. In goodness. In mercy. He said us waiting eight years to be married, fighting to save the farms as we was, that wasn’t nothing. Joked that Jacob waited seven years for his Rachel, and all that it meant was I was worth even an extra year beyond her. I told him--” Her words caught in her throat, and she gave another brisk snap of the reins. “Told him there better not be a Leah in the picture, or he’d catch hell for it.”

She’d been only teasing, known there was no Leah or anyone else. That they were it for each other, been each others' first lovers, and she’d believed they would be each others’ last too. Yes, she’d known one of them would bury the other someday, but she’d believed it would be so long down the road with both of them with grey hairs and grandchildren, not that she’d be a widow at thirty-one. “Eight years of waiting. Then that God that Jake and me loved so much let me have him for less than three. And all our goodness and mercy weren’t nothing when them six O’Driscolls busted into our home while we was sleeping. We would have given them anything they asked, but they wasn’t only after food, or money, or our horses. We realized that quick enough. They shot him in front of me before he could even fight. They...every night, took turns with me, over and over, in that same bed that was his and mine. Took breaks from their poker game to do it.” That had been somehow almost the worst part. They’d killed him. They’d ruined her, smeared filth all over the joy she’d had in making love with Jake like their horseshit stained boots had on the floorboards. But doing it to her in that bed where she and Jake had slept and loved made for one more cruel killing blow, because it felt like it ground that already-stained part of her right into dust. She’d told Arthur her memories of Jake were still pure, and so many of them were, but those ones weren’t.

“I’m sorry. For all your suffering. For all the pain that you’ve had to bear.”

“I don’t much want your pity, Sister. I want to know where the fuck God was when that happened.”

Still staring fixedly ahead as she was, fingers gripping the reins tightly, she heard Calderón’s soft sigh next to her. “I still wonder that sometimes myself. And I don’t have a good answer. Losing my Julio, my son Manuel. The things I saw in St. Denis with so many lost and orphaned children, the cruelties and depravities they endured, and the ones some of them then did to others. Watching people die slowly from tuberculosis here. I don’t know exactly why God allows suffering like that. All I know is that I can either give in to despair and hatred, or fight against them. I try to believe I’m strong enough to see all that’s terrible in this world, and to still choose to fight for goodness and love where I can. Because if I don’t, evil wins. I guess that’s the nature of faith.”

She sounded so serene, so sure, in a way that Sadie all at once hated and envied. But at least she wasn’t preaching something about God’s grand plan. “Ain’t got much faith in nothing these days. Myself most of all. I was good. I did good. And then I became something else. I started killing every miserable outlaw bastard I found. O’Driscoll Boys, Lemoyne Raiders, Murfree Brood. Didn’t much matter. They was all sons of bitches making excuses to hurt people. Dutch’s gang, the things they was doing--the things I done with them, by the end--we hurt people. Some of them innocent. But still. We didn’t torture. We didn’t rape.” Though she wouldn’t put it beyond Micah, at that. “So I guess I made my choice. I become a bad woman, going after worse men. But...I tried, where I could. To hold them together after that business in St. Denis. To look after them, because Charles and me were the only ones left fit to ride out.” Karen would have been able to step up into it, maybe, if she hadn’t been so lost in the bottle. And she’d been unable to do much about that, scrambling as she was to look after all of them.

“They were the family you had. Of course you looked after them. I did the same.” Calderón’s voice kept low and soothing, and some part of her wanted to believe in that. That here was a woman who understood some of what it had been like, the anger and the bitterness and the shame and regret. “But that’s who you are, isn’t it? A woman who lived only for killing wouldn’t have done what you did to save a man’s life, to bring him all the way here in hopes he’ll survive.”

“It ain’t all charitable, Sister. I think most of that come out as me saving him to try to make myself feel better.”

“That’s a lot of effort for that.”

“Yeah, well, I got a lot of sins now to feel bad about. Donating a few bucks to the poor weren’t gonna do it.”

“And yet here you are helping out at the convent, far beyond daily chores. I’ve seen you. On Tuesday you were reading to Mr. Baumgartner because he can’t read himself yet. You’ve been fetching things for patients. Helping the unsteady ones on the stairs. Playing with children to give their parents some rest.”

“No reason not to. I’ve been exposed to the TB thoroughly already. Not like I gotta fear them.” But she’d seen the look on their faces, the mute gratitude at someone who wouldn’t treat them like nothing more than a walking contagion, a pathetic figure barely existing while hoping to survive and slowly get back to living. She’d been so careful to try to not make Arthur into only his damn TB, to not give him pity she knew he couldn’t bear. 

“They need kindness. They’re afraid. They’re in pain. They’ve been isolated from the world like lepers used to be. It’s one thing for nuns to care for them, or their families, but to have an ordinary woman so recently arrived not fear them or treat them differently--that means something to them. You’ve done bad things, but so have we all. I think there’s plenty of kindness and goodness in you still. You offer them love and kindness so freely, and you smile at them. What happened to you--that’s a scar. A big one, perhaps. Some things in you have changed. But it doesn’t change the whole of you.”

 _They turned me into a monster, Arthur._ She’d been so sure they took everything good and fine in her. The aching part of her wanted to reach out and take that offered grace, feel like there was some way back from the woman who’d hunted bad men with such relentless fervor, who’d stabbed Tom Watkins to death because shooting wasn’t nearly intimate enough, plus it let her stab him in the groin like she'd longed to do, give him some kind of pain to match what he'd given her. Who’d kept it somewhat together near Arthur, a vision of horror all dressed in blood, grateful that he didn’t treat her differently having seen it, that he understood her need to be alone before she completely fell apart. She’d walked away from Hanging Dog Ranch, cried at the shore of Little Creek River like she hadn’t cried in months, washing off the blood, knowing the rest of it wouldn’t wash away so easily. Then she’d changed her clothes, gone back, found Arthur, and they’d rode off back east. 

Arriving at Chuparosa spared her having to come up with a response to that immediately. Calderón headed to Garcia’s office to check in, and she went to the store to pick up the order. Doing a little browsing herself, she grabbed some chocolate and a couple more books for Arthur. He could stand some sweets, given how thin he still was, and she’d call the books a belated Christmas present. Still felt guilty she hadn’t thought to get him something, given he’d obviously spent time to make that sketch for her. It was rolled up in her things now, because she wasn’t sure what to do with it--frame it? On the other hand, some part of her liked keeping it private between them. He didn’t show that artist’s ability off freely, and the fact he’d let her into that meant something.

The shopkeeper, Esteban Ramirez by his shingle outside, rang up those purchases. Said something in Spanish, something about a big cat and some cows and some wolves, but she didn’t catch much more than one word in three. She was studying Spanish, same as Arthur, but it hadn’t took yet enough to follow all of that. 

She heard Calderón’s voice behind her, and then the little black-clad nun was there, standing at her elbow. “He said we should look out on the way back. There’s been a jaguar on the loose in the area. Killed some cows at Primera Quebrada last week. Also there have been a few bandits roaming the roads. Apparently calling themselves ‘Del Lobos’.” She nodded to Ramirez, rattled off her own order, which proved to be a sack of wintergreen candies. She grinned at Sadie’s confusion. “Even nuns have our own little vices, Mrs. Griffith.” 

Shaking her head, unable to help a bit of a smile at it, she headed out, seeing Ramirez’ boy finishing loading the order into the back of the wagon. “ _Gracias._ ” She flipped him a coin for the help, and from the grin he gave her, she might have overtipped him. Oh well. It’d make up for that sour-faced prick in Rhodes.

More cautious now for bloodthirsty beasts, either spotted cats or human, she grabbed the reins. Paused for a moment, unslung the repeater from over her shoulder, and handed it to Calderón. “If you was riding with a gang once, you know what you’re doing with this. Might as well keep lookout.”

She knew the look of someone confident with a gun, and clearly, Calderón was, handling it with comfortable ease. “Do folk at the convent know about all that, what you was back then?”

“No. I’m not sure it would matter--I’m hardly that person anymore. But I’m not sure I want all the fuss about it, either the horror or the fascination.” She shot Sadie another of those looks of mischievous amusement. “So it seems you, Arthur, and I are all keepers of each other’s secrets on that.”

If she’d known who he was even back in St. Denis, and hadn’t called the law for the bounty on his head, Sadie supposed she wasn’t going to do it now. “Fair enough. Though I guess if he’s ‘Arthur’, might as well call me ‘Sadie’.”

“Calderón, then, to you.” She nodded to acknowledge that, eyes on the road still on the way back, but this time sweeping for danger, not fixedly staring to ignore the woman at her side. Arthur said she had a way of talking sense. Maybe he wasn’t wrong on that. “Things I tell you, you ain’t telling him? Don’t you Catholics have some kind of sacred vow about that?”

“That’s the sanctity of the confessional. I’m not a priest, Sadie. Though we have no priest, so I hear enough confessions. And yes, I keep that in confidence.”

She fidgeted for a moment, bunching the reins in one hand, trying to think of how to put this. If this was her chance to get things off her chest with someone who knew and didn’t judge, maybe she’d best take it. “Maybe I like helping folk. You ain’t wrong about that. But every single day I’m at Las Hermanas, it’s all a lie. Not just feeling like not a one of them knows me, and the things I done. It’s...my fault, I know. I’m the one as started it, claiming we was married so nobody would look twice at us on the way here. I’m stuck in it now. I’m living with a man, and he’s a good man, better than he thinks he is. But we ain’t married, we ain’t even in love. I got a wedding picture of a husband I loved that I gotta keep hidden, because it clearly ain’t Arthur in it by my side. I wake up some mornings and hear him and for just one fine moment, I’m back in Pinetree Gulch, thinking I’m finally waking from a nightmare. That got my life back, that any second now I’ll see Jake smiling at me again. But then I wake up more. See it’s me sleeping in this little bed of my own, and it’s Arthur there across the room, and I lose Jake all over again.” She couldn’t help but feel some pride that she’d kept her voice steady.

“From what I’ve heard, you had no time to grieve your husband for months. You were too busy running and fighting and surviving.”

“I...maybe not. There was stuff as needed doing, always. Kept my mind busy.”

“So now it’s finally hitting you.”

“Yeah.” Her voice cracked a bit on the word. “He’s gone. He’s gone forever. And...I don’t resent Arthur, don’t think that. Not his fault he’s alive. Hell, I can’t save a man and then be angry with him for living. But still...if God or Satan or some magician showed up some morning and offered to trade them, Jake for Arthur, I ain’t sure I’m good enough a person to say ‘no’.”

“I’m not sure any of us are. Especially not when the pain is still so fresh.” 

“And the worst part is, Arthur, he wouldn’t even hate me. He’d make that trade in a heartbeat, because he don’t think nothing of himself.”

“I’ve noticed that.”

“I guess he’s stuck, in his own way. I seen how frustrated he is, not being able to do anything. And I did what had to be done to get him here, and then to stay with him so I wouldn’t be just one more bastard who abandoned him. He’s my friend. My best friend. He needs someone to look after him, and truth, I need him too. He’s fun, he’s sweet, he’s easy to be around. But I’m...it’s still hard, seeing him where Jake should be. And I can’t say that, not to him, because I know him, he’ll blame himself. Think it’s because he ain’t worth what I done. If any one of us deserved to get out of that whole disaster, it’s that man. That life trapped him from the time he was a kid. Never gave him a choice to be anything different, and when he got one finally, Lord, did he make the most of it. You didn’t see him before. Good enough, he was, but it was like--he finally let go and become his real self. Scared for all of us, you could see it, but underneath that, there was this calm he didn’t have before.” She’d envied him that serenity, that confidence, but not at the price he’d bought it. She shook her head, giving a short, sharp laugh. “He told me anytime I want free of this to be with someone else, just say the word.”

She glanced off the road to look at Calderón then, seeing the nun turn to her, put a hand on her shoulder. “I know you don’t think much of God having a plan--”

“Can you not use the word _plan_? Dutch, he was always raving about having a plan.” The word still made her cringe instinctively. 

“Purpose, then.” Sadie waved a hand in an _I’ll allow it, go on_ gesture. “He needs to heal physically. But I’d say both of you have some healing of your hearts to do besides. Maybe Las Hermanas is where you were meant to be for that, rather than struggling to survive with just the two of you alone.”

“Maybe.” Maybe there was some way to try to believe again in things, and in herself too. Though if God was pitiless enough to take Arthur too, trust twice broken seemed sign enough to not give it a third chance. So she’d see. Driving the wagon in through the convent gates, she remembered her courtesies enough. She’d been raised right. “Thank you for taking me out. You was right. I needed it.” It had helped, as wary as she’d been of it.

Calderón smiled, and patted her hand, in a gentle way that reminded Sadie of her mother, and that both healed and hurt all at once. “Of course. Come find me if you need to talk again.”

~~~~~~~~~~

He couldn’t quite escape the feeling that if he went beyond an hour of standing or sitting up each day, someone would somehow _know_ , appear, and yell at him for it. Though he suspected most of the “lungers”, like him, took to keeping cautious, almost superstitious track of it themselves, reining in voluntarily when need be. The chapel bells made that easy enough. After all, if they didn’t, they only hurt themselves by it by delaying the healing. By this point he couldn’t deny as utterly Goddamn stultifying as lying in bed like a log was, it had helped. Still coughing, still wheezing, but he could feel that fire in his chest, the racking pain, much reduced. Those lesions were starting to heal.

But having such a short time to do things meant making the most of it, and carefully choosing and prioritizing. At least a few times a week he made sure to eat sitting at the table with Sadie, rather than awkwardly half-propped in bed and sometimes making an embarrassing mess of it. That was his own rule. He still recalled all too well when he sat down to that first dinner Dutch, Hosea, Bessie, and Susan bought him, and watching them eat with no hurry and with proper silverware like he’d once known, he’d realized with such sick humiliation that living as a street brat, eating with his hands and learning to gulp his food as quickly as possible to avoid fighting for it, meant he now ate like a damn animal. Sitting at a table eating like a normal human being helped him remember, helped him keep that small sense of pride. 

Once a week, he spent some of that precious freedom heading down to the stables. Garcia might not love him taking such a long walk, and it honestly exhausted him, but he had to do it. He wasn’t the only one trapped by this TB. Sadie was too, in her own way, and he did his best to give her as much space as possible. Couldn’t be easy for her having to smile and call him her husband to everyone here, all with the ghost of her actual beloved husband still there clear as day. He’d seen her pull that wedding picture out from where she hid it, look at it sometimes, expression all wistful and soft. Remembered trudging back from Colter to bury that poor bastard because in the end, of course Hosea had sent him, and Lenny, and Javier, because he knew they could be trusted to do the decent thing. Digging that grave in frozen soil for a frozen corpse, dark-haired and very dead, with everything that Sadie Adler had loved in him gone.

He couldn’t fix that, beyond telling her she was free to cut herself free from that whole lie any moment she chose. As for Buell, stuck too, he couldn’t do much either. Heading into the stable, breathing in the scent of hay and horseshit, he was glad of the mask tugged up over his face against the hay and dust in the air. 

Bob wasn’t in his stall, so Sadie was out, either riding or hunting or something. He tried to not resent her that ability to just take off and ride. It wasn’t her fault he was sick. But seeing normal folk do all those things he’d taken for granted so many years--not easy, with his oh-so-carefully timed hour of freedom each day. Though if he hadn’t wanted to suffer like this, not beating Thomas Downes within an inch of his already-fragile life for Strauss’ Goddamn debt would have been a good start. 

He’d felt like he hadn’t had much choice, his dawdling causing Strauss and Dutch to both nag him to get to those damn debt collections, to the point he’d ridden into camp after dark and there was Dutch telling him to go help Strauss out. Trying to protest he was busy, he’d been working hard. But in the end, he went. All those ties of guilt and obligation and feeling like he couldn’t balk and be all delicate, not right now when things were so uncertain and desperate, not when so many people depended on him to help hold it together. All the while some part of him hating it so much, wanting to make anyone else do it, but him and his damn fair play notion of _Don’t ask anyone to do a thing you ain’t willing to do yourself._ Guess he hadn’t learned that one from Dutch. In the end, he was big, so he could scare the shit out of the people, and he wouldn’t come back without the job done, and so they sent him. _Vigor_ , Strauss called it. _Getting the awfulness over with,_ he called it, if only to himself. 

But in the end, something deep within him knew that wasn’t right, even before he could admit to himself how wrong everything they were doing now was. So he’d had a choice, and like every other time, he’d knuckled under to the pressure, and made the wrong choices for far too long. Looking back now, he’d seen things changing for years, not just after Blackwater. Dutch becoming some exaggerated version of himself, talking even more like some fiery street preacher, taking in more folks, pulling bigger and riskier jobs the bigger the gang got. Doing things like taking on Strauss. Before he knew it, there they were, pulling jobs just to spit in the eyes of Uncle Sam and the law and then congratulate themselves on how clever they were, still spouting the same bullshit about it being all about defiant freedom from the evil of civilization. They hadn’t helped anyone in years except themselves. They’d started hurting more people.

It felt like he’d lived with that growing unease slowly churning in his gut for longer than he could remember. He’d known it had gone bad somewhere along the line, him and Hosea both. But Arthur, always loyal Arthur, wasn’t going to question, wasn’t going to examine it straight on and drag it into the light, for fear of what he would find. Because if he let himself see it, he couldn’t deny it, and that meant leaving or confronting Dutch, and neither was an option. Coward. Though at least he’d had the honesty to loathe himself. 

All that bed rest made him even weaker, even if healthier. Just the stairs and the walk out here already made his heart beat faster, made him a bit lightheaded. Hand braced on the door of the next stall down from Bob, he waited until he caught his breath again. Reaching in his pocket, he slipped Buell a peppermint, eyeing him when he stamped a hoof impatiently, tossing his head. “If you’d behave for Sadie, she’d take you out. Until then, all you get is corral time.” She’d tried to ride him, once, when Arthur had asked, knowing poor Buell had to be going crazy from a lack of exercise. The stubborn bastard apparently stood there like a statue and refused to go anywhere with her or anyone else on his back. More polite than bucking her off, he supposed, but meant there wasn’t much anyone could do for him because of it. Letting him out into the corral each day so he could blow off steam was the best he’d get.

This was the best he could do, with that small sliver of time he had. Come down here, talk to Buell, pat him a bit. Couldn’t even brush down that creamy pale gold coat himself and make it truly shine, because that was above the exertion he was allowed. 

End of the old year, and it'd be the twentieth century at that. Guess that put him a reflective mood, or a brooding one. Either way, he found himself talking honesty to the horse rather than the usual cheerful praise and endearment. “Yeah, it’s been a strange time for you, ain’t it? Hamish died, left you to some new fella. Then I leave you in Valentine and disappear.” He’d taken Zenobia, because honored as he was by the gift of Buell and the esteem and trust in ihat, much like Rains Falls’ talisman, it would be hard days ahead, and he and Buell didn’t have that trust between them yet. The last thing he’d needed was this opinionated horse taking a notion to buck him off right when the situation was critical, and he’d sensed with Hamish that Buell was crafty enough to sense weakness, and enjoy testing his rider.

Though he could have thrown Arthur a dozen times over on the ride from Wapiti without even trying much, and he’d felt this horse sensing how vulnerable and weak the man on his back was, and deliberately choosing to go easy on him, giving as gentle a ride as possible. He’d been grateful for that kindness, prepared to have to fight Buell along the way with what little strength he’d had. “Then I show up again, drag you across four different states and a country border besides, shove you on to three trains along the way, and after all that fuss, we get here and you get shut up in a stable. I know, boy. I know. Gotta be confusing. Gotta be frustrating.”

Buell’s ears relaxed, his obvious irritation at this strange bastard showing up once again only to vanish shortly after fading. He was sure Sadie gave him treats and kind words and a pat here and there, but he must be confused and lonely. Probably still struggling to understand the various alarming turns of his life these past few months. They had that in common. He knew how smart horses were, how easily they recognized their people. Suspected something in Buell still looked for a man who wasn’t there, and that confusion and grief was part of why he stubbornly balked at anyone riding him. He’d had too much that went strange on him all at once. “You missing Hamish, boy? Me too. Hamish, and a whole lot of other folk.” 

He felt Buell leaning into the pats and caresses, lowering his head. Trusting Arthur, all the same, despite his comings and goings, despite everything he’d been and done. But what other hope did this horse have? He breathed out slowly, careful to not breathe too deeply again on the inhalation. “Believe me. I want out as much as you. Wish you and me both could just go, right now. No place in mind at all. Just ride like the wind, and feel free again.” 

His body still hurt more often than not. But lately, the harder, sharper hurt in him nothing to do with TB. That talk with Calderón let some genie out of the bottle, all that pain he’d had stoppered up, and there was no taking it back. It had done him good to let it go, lance the whole festering mess of it, but that didn’t heal the thing immediately. The ache still remained, as would the eventual scar. “When I get a bit better,” hoping so much that it truly was _when_ and not _if_ , “I promise you, we’ll go out, you and me. Maybe we ain’t gonna go far or fast, not yet. But it’ll still be a fine day riding out past them walls, won’t it?”

That soft nicker of response felt like answer enough, and he smiled at that, giving one last stroke to Buell’s nose, slipping him another peppermint while he was at it. Hearing the bell tolling--he’d been up half an hour, and he wanted to save the other half for tonight--he started the slow shamble back up to his room, ready to sleep off the weariness for a few hours. 

His watch still worked for when the nuns laid off the bells in the night. Been a bit of a chore keeping correct time when they’d been zigging and zagging across time zones, and knowing exactly where those arbitrary map lines cut across was no mean feat anyway. But he’d kept up on it all the same, and here in Las Hermanas was no different. So he checked his watch again, seeing it was 11:45. Glanced over at Sadie, sitting at the table, scribbling something in her own journal. He had to admit, shoe on the other foot now, that there was some fascination in wondering what she was writing. But of course he never sneaked a peek, even if it would be easy enough with her out as much as she was. It would be too much a breach of trust.

He closed the book--Kate Chopin’s ”The Awakening”. One of the ones Sadie got him for a bit of a late Christmas. Told him, with a wink, that the shopkeeper in Chuparosa said it was both new and apparently pretty racy. He couldn’t much relate to a woman’s lot in this life, true, but he knew they had plenty to be miserable about. He could sympathize with Edna Pontelier’s realizing how unhappy and small her life truly was, how she’d bent and twisted herself to fit a thing she didn’t want to be, and then trying so hard to break free and become someone more true. And in the end, she chose to die rather than go back to her cage. So maybe he did it by defying Dutch rather than taking a lover like Pontelier--apparently that was the racy bit--but he guessed he’d had his own awakening of sorts. “Near midnight. You want to go to the roof for a bit?” Interpreting her glance, he assured her, “I got half an hour left.” Sometimes he felt like this had to be a bit what prison felt like, all rules and strict schedules and whatnot. He hadn’t asked John about Sisika either. There were more pressing matters, and some pains it didn’t do to prod a person on only to fulfill curiosity.

“You was fast asleep this afternoon when I came in. Slept a good while. You sure you ain’t pushing too hard?”

“I’m fine. Short walk up there, that’s all.” Sadie being Sadie, she took that without doubt or criticism, trusting him on it.

Though the moment they got up to the roof, she pointed at one of the cots there with an emphatic jab of her finger. “Fine. You made it up here. Now lie down. You can watch the year change over like that just as good as sitting up.”

He could hear the soft murmur of other folks down in the courtyard, obviously thinking the same. “Sure, you got it, boss. Lie back and think of America, is that how it goes?”

He heard her soft cackle of laughter. “Just about.” Though he’d never been up here after dark like this. Stretched out, looking up at the night sky, he couldn’t help but admire the scattering of the stars in the darkness. They shone as bright and beautiful as ever. How many nights had he passed in various camps like that, or out in the wilds? He’d take this, feeling the comfort of something not changing, when so much had. That felt like its own small piece of freedom. No matter what, those same stars would be there, and TB or no, he could lie there and look at them and think about things.

“Grab a cot yourself and give a look up. We got some fine stars out tonight.” Sensing her hesitation, he gave a snort of amusement. “You can watch the year change over like that just as good as sitting up.” 

“Shut up, you.” But she did it, and he heard the soft creak of metal and canvas as she moved from the wooden bench against the wall to the cot next to his. “All right, maybe you was onto something with that idea.” 

He stole a look at his watch again, leaving it lying on his chest so he could easily look again. Ten minutes to go. There was this strange compulsion in him to say some things, maybe clear some of it out before the clock turned things over to a clean page. “You’re a good woman, you know that?”

“I been trying to believe that. I guess you’re trying to believe you’re a good man. It ain’t easy, after all we been through, all we done.”

So she did understand. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I ain’t glad to be here like this, and I ain’t glad it’s put on you what it has. All the lying and pretending, like Jake weren’t nothing. I know that’s nothing fair to you. But...I’m glad you’re here.” 

He heard her draw in a slow, uneven breath. Heard the shakiness in her voice for a moment. “Thank you, Arthur. I’m glad you’re here too.” The silence drew on, but it wasn’t uncomfortable. “I think if you’d died I might be dead too.”

“Me? Nothing in me worth anyone dying over.”

“No, you’re just about only worth killing yourself for everyone else, that it?” He couldn’t help but smile at that sharp tongue, even as something in his heart twisted at remembering all of it. “You saw how I was. Folk didn’t need me to lead things after Dutch got back. We got John back. Took out them O’Driscolls. Got out the folk we could. After that? Nothing much left, and me left as somebody I didn’t much know anymore.”

“I know. I seen you fighting, how you was about it.” Nothing held back, rushing in with nearly a berserker’s rage, taking on insane amounts of risk. “Nobody needed you so now you went out to die, was that it?” He asked it as softly as he could. She didn’t answer, which seemed answer enough. She’d always been easy to talk to, and some things hadn’t needed saying anyway. But all the same, it was simpler to lie there and look up at those distant stars and how small they made all the problems of people seem, and say it there or listen to what she said, rather than to look right at her. “Proper pair of fools you and me make, Sadie. Think I ain’t done it, getting all reckless and hoping someone would put a bullet in me? Couldn’t this year, too many folk depending on me, but other times, when things was better for the gang? Dutch, he thought I was fearless, thought I was just ready to take on anything. Didn’t see the forest for the trees. I got this TB and maybe I was almost glad because there’s something in me that’s always been longing to die, so I wasn’t gonna have to keep living with who I was, the things I done. You get so damn _tired_ , fighting a war inside yourself all the time, wishing you was different, hating that you ain’t.” 

She listened to that, and she finally spoke up, voice hushed. “Yeah, that’s just about right. But me, I think that’s how you know there’s a good person in you, even if it’s struggling hard. Bad folk, they don’t never feel bad. They don’t worry about whether they’re good.” _There’s a good man in you, Arthur, but he’s wrestling with a giant._ Mary had seen that, clearly enough. “Maybe that fight gets easier, eventually.”

“I think Calderón’s smart on that. It ain’t about choosing it once, and suddenly you’re good forever. It’s every day. And maybe you keep choosing it, get further away from all them things you regret, that fight does get easier. The good in you, it gets stronger. Seems simpler now to do want to do good things than it did six months ago.”

“Yeah, she does talk some good sense. Expected her to come at me with theology and I’d tell her to piss off, but damn, she’s a wily one.”

“You and me both.” That was Calderón’s gift--coming at folks with love, and somehow making things OK. “Who I was back in Colter when we met, you ever expect that fella to be talking with a nun?”

“Being honest, I wasn’t noticing much of you or anyone else then.”

“Fair enough.”

“But you was kind, even then. As much as you’d let yourself be. Every day you was in camp, Colter and Horseshoe both, you’d come see if I was OK. Trying to cheer me up and all. I took a snap at you sometimes, I know, cause I wanted to be left alone, or I thought I did. But you still tried. And you cared.” 

“I worry about folk. In my nature, I guess.” It felt good to admit that openly enough. “Never thought seeing you then that you’d go gunslinger yourself, let alone be leading the whole thing for a time.” The pale, near-silent ghost of a woman who’d go retreat to the edge of camp to cry and talked mostly in a few words, if at all, seemed near impossible who had emerged from beneath that deep dark shroud of grief, fine and angry and determined and funny and kind. “You did a damn fine job keeping them together.” 

“I was thinking to get folk across the border. Canada or Mexico--hadn’t decided which. I was leaning Mexico because of winter coming on. Hadn’t made much of a plan yet, in case you boys come on back.”

“You got me here, so looks like that was a good plan. Well done.” There was a notion in his mind now, and he turned it over, examining closely. Yes, he should say it. “Might have been best for everyone if we ain’t come back from Guarma at all. Dutch took charge again, dragged us right back into the mess. I expect you would have led them out, found them someplace safe, given more time.” Five minutes left now.

“The others, maybe, but don’t say things would have been better if you ain’t come back.” She exhaled in a slow sigh. “You’d be dead on that island from whatever mess you ended up in, or the TB, and all them folk you helped after you got back would be the worse off. Maybe you and me should have tried to push Dutch out, then. Folk always believed in you. They’d started believing in me. But we was too loyal. And I guess with Dutch, Bill, Micah, and Javier back, and it being just you, me, Charles, and John in jail, Karen in the bottle, and you sick--I ain’t sure it wouldn’t have turned into a bloodbath.” 

“Damn near did anyway in the end. All of us pointing guns at each other, and if not for them Pinkertons, there would have been more dead folk in that camp than poor Susan. Javier--maybe he would have turned back. Ain’t sure. But the rest?”

“You wouldn’t let me go with you. I would have.”

“I know. But Charles was gone already. I wanted you far away from it. Would have sent John away too, if I’d known he was alive. It wasn’t gonna be nothing nice. I wanted all of you to live. To have something beyond that.” He’d gone planning to either convince Dutch to take Micah out, or die in trying. No illusions that a single sick man could drop the rest of them by himself.

“Maybe. But you deserved to live too.” That hit him hard, breathing catching for a moment in a way that had nothing to do with the TB. “I know you wanted to take care of Micah, but--” 

“I should have taken care of him long before that. Suck to my guns, refused to let Dutch bully me into breaking him out from jail. He’d have hanged and maybe it wouldn’t have all gone so bad. We all got our responsibility for what happened, we all went along with it far too long. But that little fork-tongued viper whispering in Dutch’s ear, whipping up the craziness, he was the one who turned it real ugly.”

“Are you planning to go after Micah?” Her voice was strangely steady and even. He heard the rustle and creak of her shifting on her cot. “Look at me, huh?”

Hitching over onto his side, he saw she’d turned to him as well, looking straight at him, head propped up on one hand. Close enough to touch, if either of them reached out, but he tried to respect her on that, not impose. “I ain’t doing much of anything right now, mind.” 

She made a little sound of what he took to be mingled amusement and irritation. “Answer the question, Arthur.”

He got one arm under under his head, settling in more comfortably. “Look, I’m hoping the law finds him, hangs him, and the whole business is done. But he’s gone to ground somewhere, and he’s slippery and dangerous. They might not run him down. And if they don’t--then yes, when I’m better, and when I know where he’s at, I gotta go after him.”

“Thought you wasn’t in the business of revenge?”

“I ain’t. I’m talking fixing a thing I should have done.” As far as he saw it, Micah had become a debt of honor, and if he could, he needed to pay that someday. “I let that bastard walk in and do what he did. Because if anyone could have pushed it more, it was me. He was always kissing Dutch’s ass, aiming for my spot as the right hand man, and I let him up and take it. I didn’t do what needed doing, and other folk paid for it. I gotta make that right, if I can.”

Somehow he wasn’t surprised she didn’t protest, tell him there was no way. She understood debts of honor herself. Harder to see the look in her eyes in the moonlight, but he could imagine it all the same, that determination. Oh, he shouldn’t ask, but there was nobody else he’d rather have with him for it, nobody in this world he would trust more. “If I go, will you ride with me?” 

She didn’t even hesitate, which didn’t surprise him at all. “Of course. I ride with you, you ride with me. That’s how it goes with us, ain’t it?” 

“Just about.” Grabbing the watch again, he caught it just in time. “Less than a minute left.” Watching the seconds tick down, midnight finally hit. “1900. Ain’t that something. New year, new century.” A year and a century he hadn’t believed that he’d see, and somehow it was all at once full of so much possibility and the realization that the world he’d loved and understood, that old wide open west, that was just a little bit more gone now. Bittersweet, then, but he’d told Compson some legacies weren’t fit for anything but burning. He shouldn’t be waxing nostalgic for the bank robberies and the killings and all that, turn it into some squeaky-clean romantic notion. But the wide open spaces, the sense of freedom, yes, he’d always miss that as civilization and order and all of that gobbled it up bit by bit. Though even the supposed untouched simplicity of the west was its own myth. They’d stolen it all from the Indians to begin. Maybe few things were ever simple. 

Caught up in that thought as he was, Sadie surprised him by reaching out, taking his hand in hers for just a moment. “You OK?”

“Wasn’t remembering nothing bad. Just miles away for a minute. You wanna head back down?”

“No. I kinda like it up here. You was right. It’s real pretty.” She let go his hand and turned onto her back again, looking up at the sky. He did the same, and soon enough he found himself falling asleep under those stars.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter From Bonnie MacFarlane**  
Dear Mr. Griffith,  
Thank you for your kind letter. Not many would have bothered to do so, especially with not knowing the man in question, or who to actually write to in the end.

His name was Nathan Hays. We loved each other once, but we was both young and foolish and in the end the thing between us didn’t work out. He had a notion to go make something of himself and hope that would fix things between us, even as I told him it wouldn’t. We always wanted different things. But he was determined. 

His folks are gone, but I have written his sister Hannah in Ohio to let her know. Seems that New Austin did not agree with her so she went back east long ago. I appreciate you being able give her relief from never knowing what come of Nate, even if it is not easy knowledge to bear immediately.

Should you find yourself in Hennigan’s Stead, please drop by the ranch. My pa and I owe you some hospitality, and I’d like to personally thank the fella who takes trouble for things like these.

Bonnie MacFarlane

PS I realize how it looks to some folk, a woman with no husband asking a man to come visit her. I’ve always thought that’s all just a bunch of nervous stupidity by people with nothing better to think about. Rest assured my motives are nothing but proper. If there is a Mrs. Griffith, she’s welcome too. And if there ain’t a Mrs. Griffith, then you don’t need to worry about me having designs on me becoming just that.

 **Arthur’s Journal**  
Got a letter back from Miss MacFarlane--Bonnie, as is. Invited me and my “Mrs. Griffith”, if I had one, to come visit her someday. If Sadie meets her, God help me. Them two together is a thing I suspect I have no hope on matching. I make enough of an idiot of myself already without help. One hell of a woman, if I am to judge, fierce and fine. Doubt she obediently does what her daddy tells her. 

I guess I can’t help compare the whole thing to Mary and me, much as I shouldn’t. But maybe I see too much of it in what she wrote back. Two young fools who never could have made it work, and him hoping all the same. Nate Hays, you poor, sad fool. I pity you, because ain’t I been you? I am yet, at that. All of it with Mary is still there, lodged in me like a splinter I can’t quite dig out. I need to. She made it clear that’s all done. But I can’t just yet. 

Dying for love sounds sweet enough. But when the last breaths you draw are lonely ones, it ain’t fully peaceful. The regret is right there along with the satisfaction. 

**Sadie’s Journal**  
( **Tune and lyrics for “Auld Lang Syne”** )  
Collection notes: “Writing this one down again in this new songbook. Scottish song for the New Year, collected from my grandmother Rose (Duncan) Griffith. She was from Aberdeen.”

Personal notes: “Grandma Rosie used to sing this at New Year, in that thick accent of hers. Bidding goodbye to the old year and welcoming the new. This won’t be the 1900 I imagined when 1899 hit. Thought I’d still be at the ranch. Jake and me maybe finally expecting a baby by now, with any luck. Here I am, just about as far from Ambarino snows as you can get. I expect that making peace with everything ~~taken from me~~ I lost will be a long healing. Bitterness is like any poison. It works its way out slow. But at least I’m not so alone as I felt I was. That’s a bit of comfort.”


	9. Las Hermanas: Further Questions of Life Philosophy

It turned out there didn’t seem to be much difference between peeling a potato and getting the pelt off an animal. It took some patience and a delicate touch with the knife to carefully get the whole thing free from its skin, and not ruin the whole business. Not to mention in both cases, people felt more than free to comment on the handiwork. He’d turned a few spuds into nothing but tiny nubbins by carving too deeply until he got the hang of it, and Sister Ursula’s very patiently disappointed commentary stopped.

Not that much difference in cutting meat off a carcass and chopping or carving it, and cutting vegetables, at that. Filleting fish, easy as pie already. Funny thing was that apparently he could repurpose some of the things he’d been doing, particularly last year since fleeing Blackwater, into something useful here. A man who knew his way around a knife could apparently be a very, very useful fellow in numerous ways.

Anyway, kitchen duty was about all he was deemed good for just yet, at least physically. His Spanish got a lot better these four and a half months, true, but it wasn’t good enough yet to teach reading, writing, any of that, just yet to any of the locals. He’d taken up teaching a couple of _Americanos_ here who couldn’t read or write, and that satisfied. Though it tugged on memories of Hosea too hard some days.

Having something to do with his hands and his body, and not just his mind, that helped. Even if he could imagine anyone in camp would have laughed themselves sick to see Arthur Griffith, Morgan as recently was, using a knife against onions rather than enemies, mixing masa dough for those flat _tortillas_ , and things like that. 

Didn’t matter. Kept him busy, and Sister Ursula was kind and patient even when he was a dumbass. She must have dealt with any number of clueless idiots like him over the years, must have understood full well by now that even a tiny thing like plucking a chicken or grinding chili peppers for a sauce became a bit of a reward and a victory after months in bed going half-crazy. 

Still--in some ways it was almost harder. Being up and able to walk around easily enough now came with its share of temptations. He felt a bit like a horse himself these days, with Garcia stubbornly yanking the reins on him every two weeks during his check-ups and scheduled torment session with _El Cactus_. “Refills”, Garcia called that. “Refucks”, Arthur called it to himself in a grim kind of a pun, and if he could translate that into Spanish, he imagined more of his fellow patients-slash-inmates might get a good cackle from it. 

He'd come up with that one due to reasoning it was about what things were probably like in bed for a lot of women. Lying there getting jabbed for a few minutes by something wheezing and pumping away, being uncomfortable and vaguely annoyed, and then quickly dismissed when it was all over. He’d heard the women laughing about their times with men amongst each other often enough in camp, in that way of making a joke out of something to make a shared nuisance bearable. Besides, he wasn’t stupid enough to imagine he had been all that impressive either, stupid clumsy boy that he'd been.

Yesterday’ s check-in, Garcia cleared him for yet a little bit more off the list, but warned him once again about pushing too far, too fast. _Your lungs are healing well enough, but now we need to work to rebuild their strength, and your body’s strength too. Slowly, Mr. Griffith. I mean it. Keep walks, rides, anything like that, fairly short. No hard physical labor yet. Stop right when you start to feel tired. It’s easier to leave something undone than to exhaust yourself._

After a session in the loving embrace of _El Cactus_ , about all he wanted to do was go sleep off the exhaustion and the strange aching pressure in his chest. So there went yesterday. Today? Maybe today he’d finally take Buell out, and it’d probably frustrate the horse to keep it short, but it had to be better than the corral. That notion sparked a feeling of excitement all the same. One more bit of freedom. It was all about the little things now, but that didn’t mean they weren’t worth having. 

Finishing one of the potatoes for dinner, he threw it into a pot of water to keep it from browning in the air. Sister Ursula glanced at it, smiled, and nodded, obviously pleased that she’d taught him enough to not have to supervise him constantly. When she headed over to the pantry to fetch something, he glanced at his fellow scullion across the water pot and the bushel of potatoes, and raised an eyebrow. She was new. It was an odd in-between stop, being on dedicated kitchen duty. Hector Ferrera had moved up to a job in the stables last week. Took him two years to get that far. Bettie Spotted Tail he barely knew, as she’d left on his second day, gone to help with the laundry next. The rest of the kitchen help was usually a rotating scheme of folks deemed capable of more strenuous work, but dropping in for a shift to help Sister Ursula out all the same.

This new girl, Sarah Landry, she’d introduced herself as when she started a few days back, and she looked about eighteen or so. She chuckled in polite acknowledgment, ducking her head while still peeling her potato. Avoiding his eyes, as most black folk did to whites. He forgot that sometimes still, different as it had been in the gang. New enough to this kitchen, but clearly she had her share of experience at cooking. “Don’t worry,” he told her, “Sister Ursula don’t bite, not that I seen.” He leaned in, lowering his voice to a conspiratorial tone. “Them trusting anyone around this many implements of mayhem,” nodding to the various knives, mallets, and whatever else, “she’s gotta be OK.” He wouldn’t tell her that he’d known a cook with a temper on him. He still wasn’t sure what would have happened between Sadie and Pearson had he not intervened, though his money, then and now, would firmly have been on Sadie. 

He couldn’t see beneath the blue-and-white checked cloth tied around her nose and mouth, but he could imagine the small, polite smile on her face. Thought about Tilly’s telling him back before Blackwater, _When you’re a Negro girl in this world, Arthur, you learn real fast to not ignore a white man’s jokes, but you don’t smile too much at them neither._ Decided to hell with it, he might as well be honest and try to put her at ease. “Look, Miss Landry? I know a gal like you, got no reason to trust me on sight. And maybe I ain’t saying I’m a good man. I’m--trying, anyway. But whatever my sins, those don’t include the business of pestering women, of whatever color. You tell me you’d rather I shut up and mind my own damn business, well, that’s that.”

She took that thoughtfully, carefully, much like Tilly would. Pulled another stripe of peel off the potato in a long curl over the blade of her knife, finishing it and slipping it into the water. She reached into the basket for another potato. Then she finally spoke up again. “You a married man, Mr. Griffith? Think I seen you out walking with a woman couple days ago.”

“Yeah, I am.” He smiled wryly. “Though I reckon you’re smart enough to know that ‘I do’ don’t stop some fellas messing around. And I could tell you Sadie would skin me alive if I did, and that’d be true. But I’d rather you believe it’s that I got at least a few scruples to claim, and that I ain’t a man for running around on my wife cause I care for her, not that I’m afraid of her wrath.”

That got a more genuine laugh from her. “You don’t wear no ring, though.” She nodded towards his left hand. “Couldn’t afford it?”

The lie came easily enough to his lips as he reached for another potato himself. Hosea would be proud at how he’d started to inhabit the role, slip into the boots of Arthur Griffith in a way where he had to think about it less and less. Longest con he’d ever run, that was for damn sure, pretending to all these people he was something other than a broken-down outlaw still looking to redeem himself. “Sold it to help pay for the trip here. It’s my TB. Wasn’t gonna make her sell hers.”

“My daddy had to sell his watch to get Momma and me here,” she said with a low sigh. “Heard about this place from my Aunt Harriet out near Armadillo. Daddy, he back home still.”

“Where’s that at? Not Armadillo, I guess.”

“Lemoyne.” Now he listened twice as carefully, though he made himself keep peeling that potato as casually as anything.

“Lemoyne, huh? What, was you living in St. Denis, Eighth Wonder of the World, so they say?”

“Bless you, no, sir. We all just country folk. Got a place in Scarlett Meadows. Why, you ever been out Lemoyne way?”

Arthur Griffith of course knew not the first damn thing about Lemoyne. He’d never lived there, never breathed that thick-as-cotton air, never cursed the mosquitoes, never been convinced he’d die in a cellar there butchered by brutal men, never seen those eerie swamps at night, never watched Dutch Van Der Linde drown the most powerful man in St. Denis and feed him to a gator, never waved farewell to Colm O’Driscoll right before they sprung the trap of the gallows in Guiteau Square, never lost Hosea and Lenny and Kieran and Sean. God, how he wished those months in Lemoyne could be wiped away so cleanly as that. “Can’t say as I have. Grew up in New Austin, but when I was a bit older, we up and moved to California. Working out there, running horses and the like. Did a bit of time as a deputy once when the need came up.” He and Sadie had agreed on that story. He sure as hell wasn’t going to steal Jake’s life and claim to be from Tumbleweed, easy as that would have been. God knew she’d had enough of that man taken from her. 

“As well,” she said with a nod. “Things gone crazy in Lemoyne last summer. Some big outlaw gang apparently come on in for a time. Other gangs hurrying in to fight with them, lots of Pinkertons looking to get them, all that. Got so you was real careful out on the roads.”

“Sounds like trouble.” He indicated the dark red kerchief tied around his own face. “Fellas in masks make you nervous after all that, then?” Jesus, he hoped none of the gang had robbed them. Though most folks in Lemoyne, aside from the St. Denis swells, the Braithwaites, and the Greys, seemed to live a pretty hand-to-mouth existence from what he’d seen. He could at least say he’d never seen her before, so she would have no reason to stare at the masked man peeling potatoes across from her and recognize him.

She shook her head, starting to look up from her peeling more, looking at him more directly. “We got no fuss from them. All the trouble, that was further south. Only thing we ever saw was a black fella about my age, actually gave us a few bucks when he stop to ask directions. Momma said he seemed too nice a boy to be an outlaw.” 

He couldn’t help it. Closed his eyes a moment, and because he knew she couldn’t see it, smiled, fondness and grief all knotted up within him. _Ah, Lenny, of course you done a thing like that. You always was a good kid._ Good to hear at least one person who’d encountered the gang last summer and hadn’t had their life ruined by it. Though TB would do its best towards wrecking her life all the same. “That’s rare, from what I seen. There’s plenty of outlaw folk where meeting them, that ain’t nothing nice.” The O’Driscolls. The Lemoynes. The Pozners. The Quimby-Thompsons. The Murfrees. Four violent yahoos calling themselves a “gang” without any name he’d known or cared about, who’d robbed a cabin in Wyoming, killed a woman and a little boy for the sport of it.

“I suppose. You met your share of outlaws?”

Well, he’d walked right into that particular patch of shit. “Met a few, sure. For a while out west, folk just about couldn’t throw a rock without hitting some fool with a gun fancying himself a big bad outlaw.” Those had been the early rough-and-tumble days, when their little family hadn’t needed to scrap and fight for big scores with the big gangs. The whole business had been small and nimble and smart then. Things changed in the last five or six years of the gang, especially. They’d all changed along with it.

Fortunately she seemed to take that at face value and moved on. “How long you been here?”

“Oh, a bit over four months now. You?” He reached into the basket, grabbed the last potato, and set to work.

“Five weeks.” He nodded at that. Seemed like he saw folks all the time popping up who’d been there for a while, but given they were all on bed rest to start, that wasn’t surprising. 

“Guess you caught your TB in time that you’re already on light duty. Me, I’m a stubborn ass. Left it too long. I got a full two and a half months of bed rest to start, then another month of the only work I done being mostly writing letters for folk and teaching reading to them as don’t speak Spanish yet. Been in here with Sister Ursula a month now.”

She let out a low hum of sympathetic acknowledgment. “Bad off, you was.”

He nodded in reply. “I was. Barely made it here, truth be told.”

“So you teach reading? In English, I mean? I ain’t so good with the Spanish. I’m learning, but...”

“Yeah, I know how that goes with the Spanish. Why, you aiming to learn to read?” She ducked her head, nodded shyly. “Didn’t get a chance to learn till I was fourteen myself. Ain’t never too late to start.” Hosea had told him that, somehow sensing in that way that he had that Arthur had needed to hear it, that he wasn’t hopeless and stupid and too old to make up for lost time. “Well, gonna be stuck here a while, you might as well come out of it an educated gal. We meet on the southern rooftop, 8 in the morning until 10. Courtyard’s better in the afternoon, but the roof’s nice in the morning. I got my own Spanish lessons up there after that.”

“It all right by you if Momma comes to learn too?”

“Sure.”

From the crinkle at the corner of her eyes, he thought she was smiling a real smile beneath that mask. Might have been about the first spark of something to look forward to that she’d got since she arrived here. “You see where Sister Ursula went?”

“She went to find me.” There was Sadie, coming into the kitchen from the shady corridor leading to the courtyard. “There’s a shopping trip, and it’s my turn to go. Nice being one of them as they’ll let on the roads.” She held up a list in one hand, waving it lightly. “You up for a trip to town, Arthur? I asked Garcia about it.”

“Him and _El Cactus_ are still busy making friends, huh?” Took the man three days to do all the pneumothorax treatments every cycle, with all the patients still here, and a handful of others who’d been released but had to keep living nearby and coming back regularly for another round of it for a couple more years, until Garcia was totally satisfied their lungs were all right. Sounded like that would probably be his future, if he got that far. 

“Just about. He says you’re OK for it, so long as you keep your mask on, you don’t do too much of the driving, and you ain’t lifting anything heavy at the store.”

He put the kitchen knife down on the table and stood, stretching his back out lightly, cramped as it was from hunkering over those potatoes. “Well, hallelujah! I’m graduating from chopping vegetables to shopping?”

She quirked an eyebrow at him, and from the smirk on her face, he sensed what was coming. “Well, honey, I think we can both agree now, _ain’t cooking work_?”

All right, he could admit he’d deserved that one, just as much as she’d deserved his quip throwing her own words at her about veggies and shopping. Though now he had to sympathize with Sadie back then at Clemens Point. When a simple trip to town was an escape and a real treat, that said something about life. “You been holding that one back just waiting to use it, ain’t you?”

“You know it. So, coming or not?”

“Coming right along.” He shrugged and looked at Sarah. “Spuds are done, and no Sister Ursula, so guess I’m in charge, and I’m saying you’re free to go.” She shook her head, giving him a dismissive wave of amusement, getting to her feet. Heading for the door, he nodded to Sadie. “Gimme five minutes.”

“Fine. I’ll be waiting with the wagon.”

Heading up to their room, he changed his shirt for one less covered in potato starch and the like, and hung it up on a hook to dry. It would do for tomorrow’s kitchen work still, before shoving it in the canvas bag labeled “GRIFFITH” for his and Sadie’s laundry. Hesitated, reaching for the gunbelt still hanging on its nail from where he’d put it, last November when they’d arrived. They said there were some bandits out on the roads of late. Just a few idiots, most like, but no point being unprepared.

It had felt strange for a while to go without the weight of those guns on his hips, but he had no cause to wear them around the convent. Now it felt almost strange to buckle them back on, though he noticed with some pleasure that he’d gained back enough weight that he had to buckle the belt looser than last fall, backed off from those last two holes he’d had to punch himself to make it still fit. He’d seen that too with his clothes, but that was a gradual thing, not a sudden contrast like this. No kidding himself that he didn’t still look a thin, tired, and ragged mess, and his face in the mirror when he shaved confirmed it, but at least things were improving.

Heading downstairs, he found Sadie waiting, as promised. Climbed aboard the wagon, instinctively wanting to reach for the reins, but backing off. “Your driving improved much since last we went out?” he teased. “Pretty sure you run right over some poor bastard that time.”

She snapped the reins briskly and set the wagon off, reaching over to give a playful shove to his knee. “Didn’t ask you, mister.” Though as they headed through the convent gates, she glanced over at him, giving him a smile. “Nice to be out, I bet?”

He smiled back, though of course she couldn’t see it. He’d be a good boy and keep the bandana up, because here in the desert, inhaling any kicked up dust could be hell on his still-grouchy lungs. “Yeah. It’s real fine.” She kept silent for a few minutes, letting him just look around and get a look at things, since he’d been left staring at them from the rooftop for months.

He had seen almost nothing of this journey between Chuparosa and Las Hermanas the one time he’d taken it before. Garcia refused to let him ride the rest of the way on Buell, insisted on having him lie down in the back of his wagon on a blanket. Worn out as he was by the long trip from Wapiti, he’d actually fallen asleep back there amidst the rattling crates of supplies, and woke only when he felt Sadie’s hand on his shoulder when they got there. He’d gotten up to their newly-assigned room and then knocked out a full seventeen hours of sleep, so she told him. 

So this all was new, and he couldn’t help drinking in the sights of the Perdido desert with delight, the wide open expanse, the bluffs and canyons. Plants and animals, some familiar enough, some strange and new that he’d have to look at further sometime. It called on some vague memories of Armadillo from his early years. They’d never been so far south with the gang. Hosea, being from the eastern New York mountains, and Dutch from near Philadelphia, they seemingly avoided going too far south, even far out in the west as they’d been in states that had nothing to do with the Civil War. Utah, Nevada, Colorado, that was about it.

“Here.” Jolted from his sightseeing, he turned back to her as she handed over the repeater. “Never a bad idea to add to the pantry while we’re out. Keep your shooting from getting rusty besides. You shoot anything too big, I’ll handle most of the skinning and dressing.”

“Got it, boss.” He couldn’t resist laughing, shaking his head. “Going from feeding a huge gang to feeding a huge convent of TB patients. Some things don’t change much.” Micah would have considered them both full of uselessness. He shoved that thought away with effort. Never mind it. He didn’t want that bastard wrecking a fine day like this. “Chuparosa got a gunsmith that you saw?”

“Yeah, why?”

“Ought to see about these guns.” He indicated the revolvers in their holsters. “The one’s got a bit of a catch, gotta force it. Maybe see if he’s got something better.” These guns were old, badly maintained Army surplus and it showed, and truth be told, he’d been too exhausted to worry about it in Wapiti, but it made him nervous now. Dutch had taught him plenty of crooked and bad lessons, but the ones about guns--how to shoot, how the right gun could make the difference in those fractions of seconds and those few feet between life and death--those still felt sound.

She gave him a sidelong glance. “I know the life you--we--was living, we had to be particular about having good guns. But you planning on shooting many folk that you worry about it now?”

Did she really think he would backslide so easy as that? “Not planning on seeking out killing, no. But if them bandits are enough on the roads they want us ready for slinging lead if it come to it, I aim to be ready, not trying to use no damn revolver with a bent hammer. Best way to get dead in a hurry is to either get reckless or be unprepared.”

“That some more of that profound outlaw wisdom I missed?”

Well, if she wanted outlaw wisdom, he’d give it to her. “You’re lucky you wasn’t killed, charging right in at them O’Driscolls as you always were. That how you go hunting too?”

Her mouth tightened in a sulky line he recognized as a warning sign. “No.”

“I wasn’t in a place to say much about it, or tell you how to do things. But--look. You almost got killed, more than once, because you got so caught up in the fight. And…”

Spotting a jackrabbit, that provided a welcome distraction. The first shot missed, but the second hit true. She pulled the wagon over, and he jumped down, grabbed the kill, making short work of it. He’d skinned enough rabbits last year for it to become near instinctive. Stowing it, he climbed back on, and they continued. 

Her temper had eased, and she looked at him calmly now. He let her speak up first on it, wanting to read what she was thinking. “It ain’t like we’re living that life anymore.”

“No. Just...I remember. Before we set off for Rhodes, and there I was making my big speech at you about wanting to go out running with the men, for everyone’s benefit.” He heard her snort of laughter. “Look, there was a certain, ah, demeanor I was keeping up in camp. You must have seen it. Dutch and Susan expected me to do my part, keep folks in line. And you was definitely upsetting the order of things.”

“Oh, I saw it. Oldest brother of the family for sure, you was.” She laughed in earnest now, tipping her head back in the spring sunshine. “That ‘big and tough’ talk worked on the men, Arthur, but I’m afraid us women wasn’t fooled by you. Besides, I seen how you dropped the act about thirty seconds after we got out of camp.” 

“Well, you dropped the ‘outraged and ornery’ yourself.”

“Ha, you think that was an act! I let go of it cause I got what I wanted. I got a break from Pearson barking at me like I was some shit-for-brains sailor he could order around. Karen was pissed that she hadn’t thought of threatening to kill someone besides Grimshaw to get out of camp.”

Imagining Karen’s irritation, he had to laugh himself at that. Far better to remember her like that, than wondering where she was now, if she was even still alive. Though soon enough he sobered, trying to say what he’d truly been getting at by bringing that up. “You said you wasn’t afraid of dying. Guess you proved that true enough, every fight you went into. But there’s not afraid, and then there’s looking for death. Tell me you ain’t looking to get killed no more. Please.” She’d said she couldn’t bear him dying. He wasn’t sure he could stand the same for her.

Watching her face, he saw her eyes shut for a moment, her hands tightening around the reins. “You said...you said ‘We’re more ghosts than people,’ back at the Hollow. I thought you said it just about perfect with that.” 

“It was like that. I ain’t sure that’s true now. It’s…” He spread his hands, trying to find the right words to explain it. “Wasn’t nothing much keeping either of us alive, except to see the job finished. I guess it was you and me hanging onto life for that much, but we wasn’t _living_. Now we gotta figure that whole business out.”

“I know,” she said finally. “O’Driscolls are done. And I could fight every bastard out there hurting people for fun, but there’s always gonna be another. Making peace with what I done and who I become, that’s no easy thing, but I tell myself I can’t be afraid of living neither. But the size of that notion, it scares me, all right?”

“You ain’t alone on that.”

“Just don’t be like you was, at the end of it.”

“What you mean by that?” He shook his head, confused. “You really _want_ who I was before I took a good look at things?” 

“No. But you live like you was, you ain’t gonna live long. You was doing for everyone but yourself. Do good things, Arthur, but if you don’t look after yourself too, you getting off that mountain alive don’t mean much if you just go get killed to save someone else. You live like that, you ain’t no better off than you was with Dutch, looking at yourself and seeing only what use you can be, not a man who’s got his own worth.”

 _You deserve to live too,_ she’d told him. Carrying it even further here, telling him he should continue to be here not because he’d done enough good to warrant keeping him around, but simply because he _was_ , and he was trying. He sighed at that, looking away from her towards the expanse of the desert. _Perdido_. That meant “lost”, and he could see why they named this country that, with its stark and unforgiving beauty. A man could get lost out there, if he went out unprepared. He felt these days like inside he was stumbling through a desert, trying to make some sense of himself. “I’m trying. It...that idea still don’t sit easy.”

“So long as you at least think on it, that’s a start.”

Two more rabbits later, he had to admit she’d been smart to nudge him to hunt a bit along the way. His shooting still was easy, came right back, and that small satisfaction in being able to add to the food stores, that helped too. They pulled into Chuparosa, and she stopped the wagon by the general store. “It ain’t market day on Sunday, so we’ll be able to get less fresh stuff. But the gunsmith’s down that way.” She pointed down the street.

Swinging down from the wagon, he headed down towards where she’d indicated, the painted sign with “ _Armero_ ” and a revolver guiding the way. Pushing the door open, the man, one Victor Ortiz by his sign, stood behind the counter eyed him.

“Mmhm, _tuberculosis o bandido, Señor?_ ” he inquired, gesturing to the mask still covering Arthur’s face. 

_**Ambos** , mister. Both. Lucky fella you are, I’m trying to leave the both of them behind me._ “TB,” he answered. “ _Lo siento. Yo estudio Español._ ” Hoped he’d gotten that right.

Ortiz took pity and spoke his Spanish slowly, simply, which helped. “With Las Hermanas right there, we see masked men in this town. But ones carrying guns, that’s stranger.”

“They said might be bandits on the roads. I want to be ready.” He pulled the guns loose, laid them on the counter. “I don’t think they’re worth fixing.”

Ortiz eyed them and laughed in a friendly kind of way, shaking his head. “You poor fool, you’ve been carrying these around?”

Arthur managed a wry smile. “I was sick and weak. So men beat me. Almost killed me. Took my guns. These are what I could find. I haven’t had any this bad since I was a boy.” He’d been running around San Francisco that final six months with a rusty Colt that he took off a dead man in an alley and used mostly as a prop. If he could get a drunk man alone without a gun on him, flashing it in their face usually did the trick. Hosea had busted up in laughter when he explained that. _Got some theatricality to you to go with those nimble pickpocket fingers, huh, kid?_

He’d take the man’s good humor, and what felt like a suspiciously deep discount on a fine pair of Schofield revolvers and some ammunition, even given converting between pesos and dollars wasn’t yet instinctive. Some of his doubt must have shown on even a half-covered face, because the gunsmith explained, “We’re getting bad men in Perdido. The nuns of Las Hermanas do good things. If you want to look after them, I’ll help you. Call this my good deed for the week.”

Nodding at that, he holstered the guns, then trying a quick draw, satisfied with how that felt, the balance of the guns in his hands. “All right. _Gracias._ ” Stowing them again, he headed out, walking past Garcia’s office, noticing the carefully inked sign on pale wood that hung on the door. If he translated it right, it said Garcia was at Las Hermanas and would be back around 4 PM. Folks in town must be used to that cycle of things by now.

Still felt peculiar as anything to walk down a town’s streets with two guns on his belt, the repeater slung over his shoulder, and a mask over his face, and nobody much blinked. As he passed the bank, he had the thought he could probably walk right in like this without a flicker of concern from anyone, stick a gun in their face before they could react. _Jesus, robbing that bank would probably be easy as anything._ He shook off that thought only with effort, annoyed with himself for having it. Habits and instincts of twenty years didn’t change overnight, and that included scoping out a town, including its bank, anytime he rode into a new place. 

Catching up with Sadie getting the last of the supplies loaded, instinctively wanting to go try to pick up a heavy sack of flour and help out, he found his path cut off by her. Seeing those hazel eyes gone fiery in determined annoyance, he sighed in resignation. “Yeah, yeah, I got it.” He headed up to the horses, patting them instead.

Back into the desert they went, and he would have pulled out his journal and sketched the impressive soaring rock arch to the west, but the jostling of the wagon in motion would have ruined the pencil strokes. As was, he took a good long look, trying to fix the picture of it in his mind. “That rock arch there got a name?” He nodded towards it.

“ _Ojo del Diablo._ You can actually see it from Tumbleweed if the weather’s clear enough.”

“Eye of the Devil,” he translated. “Sounds like a real happy place.” As they kept on, he saw a cloud of dust to the west, back behind them. Horses, or cattle, and as it came closer, it proved to be the former, four men on horseback. He hadn’t run with Dutch Van Der Linde and Hosea Matthews since he was a boy without learning the look of desperadoes on sight. “And speaking of happy places, think we’re about to not be in one. We got company coming.”

“Shit. Think it’s them Del Lobos?”

“Del Lobos? That what they call themselves? Think I met a some of these boys already, though that was up at Cairn Lake.” That was back when he’d been going after Flaco Hernandez to try to interview him for that silly book.

“Cairn Lake? What the hell was they doing all the way up in northern Ambarino?”

“They was on the run and hiding out, I suppose. Much the same as we was. Started as a social call to talk to one of them about his bad old days as a gunslinger, doing some writer fella a favor. Hernandez didn’t take kindly to that notion, and it turned into a gunfight. You know how it goes.” He shrugged. 

“You having a run in with them gonna be a problem?” Given he’d had to kill all of them up there, probably not.

“More outlaw wisdom for you, Sadie. You got four armed and nasty-looking men riding at you with that particular air about them? That’s nearly _always_ gonna be a problem.”

“We fighting it out?”

A year ago, he’d have shot first, gone for the fight without question. But he was in no shape for a prolonged gun battle here. He glanced at the walls of Las Hermanas, visible in the distance. No, still too far. “Not just yet. We can’t outrun them, so let’s see what’s what.” He tugged the bandana down around his neck for the moment. Better that he not look either like a bandit himself and spark a fight with that, or easily identifiable as a TB patient if the Del Lobos had seen that particular fashion trend out and about. The one would provoke an attack out of wariness, the other an attack at smelling weakness. As was, they would look like two ordinary homesteaders, albeit ones with a great deal of supplies.

One of them, the leader, reined in alongside on a big bay stallion. “ _Hola, amigos_.”

He nodded to him politely enough. “Sorry, fella, I don’t understand you.” Big dumb harmless fella smiling his big dumb harmless smile. “You speak English?”

The other three pulled up too, and the leader turned to one and said in Spanish, “Great, another pair of fucking stupid Americanos.” 

He looked them over, waiting until they pulled up just about as he’d imagined, two on each side. Three men, and then the fourth, mounted on that chestnut pinto, hanging back--still a boy, gangly and nervous. Eighteen or nineteen at most. “Look, friend, we ain’t got no quarrel with you.”

Sadie leaned closer, saying under her breath, “So what are we doing, Arthur?”

“Take off, fast as you can. You’ll know when.”

“See, the problem is that you’re here on Del Lobo land. And that, _gringo_ , is going to be your last mistake. We appreciate your donation, though.” 

Just about as expected, the leader reached for his gun, and Sadie’s timing proved impeccable as she yelled to the horses. Steadying himself against the lurch of the wagon starting up, he ducked down off the seat, getting low as he could, barking at her, “Stay down!”

“You need me to--”

“You just keep driving, I’m shooting.” Thankful now for Ortiz’s generosity, drawing those Schofields, he peeked up over the wagon seat, and took aim. Picked off the leader first with a clean shot. For some, that would be enough to make them think twice. Forced his breathing steady, because the last thing to do in a gunfight was breathe too fast, get all anxious and scared. Not to mention his particular situation with the TB wouldn’t help that either. 

The boy faltered a bit, probably not having seen gunfire like this much before. The other two kept coming, and he made short work of them as Sadie kept the wagon barreling along, and small woman as she was, she was strong as hell in being able to control those two big draft horses. “Pull up,” he yelled to her.

The kid was out of range of the Schofields, but he unslung the carbine. Easy shot into his back, a wide open target. But some other impulse moved him. Before he thought too much about it, he put a shot in front of the horse, making it nervously shy, bucking its rider. Once the kid picked himself up out of the sand, watching the fleeing horses, he took one look at the wagon, and ran like hell. 

Sadie followed his gaze. “What are you planning, Arthur?”

“Well, I ain’t in any shape to run that little buffoon down on foot unless you want me stuck in bed for the next month, so let’s circle back on him. Have a chat.”

She shook her head, laughing to herself, clucking to the horses and circling the wagon around. “Nice shooting.”

“Well, you always was insisting I’m the better shot.” Though they both knew exactly why she’d claimed that, trying to keep him from the exertion or rowing or running or whatever. Hurt his pride some then, taking it as her judging him weak and incapable. But now, it felt like a strange kind of comfort to know she’d cared enough to try to spare him what she could, take it on herself instead. He’d never really had anyone do that before. Heart rate slowing again, he pushed back up into the wagon seat with a slow, ragged sigh. “Looks like I’m still just fine at killing, though.” Now that the adrenaline faded out, he felt a strange, black kind of weariness descend on him. Guess he hadn’t left that life behind him so clearly as he thought, and it had been so easy besides.

She sighed herself at that, reaching up and settling her hat more firmly on her head from where the frantic rush with the wagon had set it a bit askew. “Jake, he didn’t think he would ever be a man who could kill somebody. His grandma, she was a Quaker. A pacifist. His daddy was a preacher. He took some of them notions from that. He'd fight to defend himself or his folk, but he never wanted to kill nobody. It’s a nice way to live, Arthur. A kind and gentle one. But even then, I was willing to kill if I needed. And I figure it don’t have to be all one way or another, either you tell yourself you can’t kill at all or else you’re rotten and you’ll kill anyone. There are folk who just _need killing_. Because they ain’t people. They’re predators. They attack, you gotta kill them before they kill you, same as a bear or a wolf. Though at least those beasts have reason when they go for you. Bad men? They’ll kill you just for sport.” She spat over the side of the wagon at that, making her opinion clear. 

There was wisdom in that, and he didn’t have much time to chew it over, because they’d caught up to the kid. “You mind getting him over here? I still ain’t much up to yelling just yet.”

She gave him a grin. “Sure.” It was still an impressive bellow from her as she shouted, “ _Alto! Ven aca, niño!_ ” 

Seeing they had him in shooting range again easily, he watched the kid’s shoulders slump, trudging slowly towards the wagon. Still trying to figure out exactly why he’d done this. Left him alive, sure. But why not just let him escape on his horse?

It wasn’t the old habit, back when they’d started getting into jostling up against other gangs and fighting for scores. Leave one of them alive, tell them exactly who they’d run up against, and let them go back to the others and to inform them of the gory details and that if one had any brains in their head, they would choose to not mess with the Van Der Linde Gang in the future. He’d usually been the chosen man to issue the intimidation and the threat. Big scary man growling at the sole survivor and demanding he carry the warning. Theatricality indeed.

 _You know exactly why you did it like this, don’t you?_ Maybe he did. Here the boy was, and Arthur looked at him. “Let me see your face, boy.” It lacked some of the impressive bark he’d had before, but he could still manage the right tone. 

He tugged down his faded blue scarf. Yes, nineteen, maybe. Skinny, gangly, that wary and angry spark in his eyes. He knew the sort. Desperately wanting kindness but kicked around enough by the world that he’d take open gentleness with contempt. Just the sort he’d been at fourteen. “Your name?”

“Javier Arcadio.” Another Javier. Javier Escuella had been this young once too, probably this desperate. Maybe this one could end up better than a maniac’s devoted slave. 

“Well, you was just a very careless baby bandit, Javier Arcadio, because now I know your name.” Pot, kettle--he’d been telling his damn name to most anyone last year when he did something he wasn’t completely ashamed to claim. Like he’d needed his name associated with some small acts of goodness in the world, even while they were trying to lie low. But the trick of it was in recognizing it wasn’t Arthur Morgan, the name itself, that so badly needed repairing. It was him, the man. 

He could almost see the kid beating himself up about that, but the fact he’d been honest only seemed to confirm things for Arthur. _Do you want to be saved?_ Calderón had asked him. How much he wished that he’d met someone like her when he was fourteen, or even eighteen, someone to tell him there was another way. That much as he loved Hosea and Dutch for saving him, he didn’t owe them his whole self for it. “You got any family to go home to?” The boy shook his head. “Dead?” A curt nod, and he glanced down at his feet at that, obviously remembering too many things. Maybe they’d died on their own. Maybe those Del Lobos killed them and took him, made him their own. “Thought so. All right, get in the wagon. We’re heading for Las Hermanas. They’ll feed you. Give you a place to stay. Find you something to do. Teach you to read if you need that. Give you some choices. This life, it won’t end well.”

The boy finally spoke up, and he had enough guts to look Arthur directly in the face as he did it. “You seem to know something about that.” 

He tried to not smile at that, knowing it would be too easy to take it for condescending amusement. “Might have seen a thing or two. Hand over that gun, while you’re at it. Call it a show of faith.” At that, he got a nod, the kid’s revolver, and he went and hopped in the back of the wagon.

Sadie got them going again, and kept her silence for a few minutes. Then she spoke to him, voice kept low, and going back to English. “Saving another orphan, huh?”

“Well, it was that or kill him, or send him back to that life. Of those, the first option seems the bigger mercy.”

“I ain’t judging. I think that was a good thing you just done.” She reached out, covered his hand with hers. It didn’t startle him when she reached out like that anymore. She was lonely, and of course she didn’t mean anything by it, just as he didn’t take it as anything more than a small moment of comfort, of simple human kindness, between two folks who’d become good friends. The fact it didn’t have to mean anything more than that actually helped.

He turned his hand over against hers, lacing her fingers with his. “Dutch--he was a weak man in the end, but he had some brave ideas. Had to, for us to believe in them and him as we did. He used to say a thing. ‘We shoot them as need shooting, save them as need saving, and feed them as need feeding.’ And we done it like that, back in the early days. We still wasn’t good men, but better for sure than what we become later.”

“So where’s the thieving fit into that code?”

He couldn’t help but laugh. “He didn’t say nothing about thieving. That’d make it sound so much less noble. But I’m thinking that philosophy, if you live by it for real, ain’t too bad as a guiding star. Makes a decent place to start, at least.” That seemed to make more sense than most things had in months. Maybe he could do all those things. Maybe Sadie was right too--it wasn’t all one way or another on killing. Shepherds might have to kill wolves, after all. It was in the knowing why the killing was done that made the difference.

“Can’t argue with that. Seems this one needs saving _and_ feeding. You definitely still need feeding.”

“No, see, you’re looking at this the wrong way. I found my next job. Tie me to a pole, stick me in a field, and I might do for scaring the birds, just about.” He glanced back into the wagon as they approached the convent gates. Yes, the boy was still there. Looked like this notion would stick.

She shook her head. “Think you’re capable of a lot more than you know.”

“Maybe. But thanks. For getting me out. I don’t know what it is that shopping trips with you and me seem to turn into gunfights, but--it was fun.” 

“Well, I’ll ride for groceries with you anytime,” as she pulled the wagon to a stop.

Shooed away from the unload, seeing Javier Arcadio standing there awkward as anything, he caught Calderón on her way to the chapel. “Much as I know you like wayward orphans with a chip on their shoulder, I figured I’d bring you one. He’s with the wagon right now. Riding with the Del Lobos, he was.”

“Trouble with the Del Lobos?” she asked him.

“Nothing Sadie and me couldn’t handle.”

She gave him one of those bright smiles she had. “Well then. I told you that you’d keep saving yourself, didn’t?”

“You did at that.” One of those who needed saving was him, still. But maybe he could help himself with that, day by day. A few bandits not around to hurt folks, and one boy maybe given a choice in life again--today felt like a good step towards that. Better than peeling potatoes, anyway.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Charles to Arthur**  
Dear Arthur,  
I got your letter, so thank you for letting me know where you are. I got to admit I laughed at you and Sadie in a convent. But it seems that’s where you need to be, and from what you said, it’s doing your spirit some good too along with your TB.

It was a hard winter in Canada. Bad as the snowstorm in the Grizzlies, and like the gang, we didn’t have proper shelter before the first snowstorm hit. The tribe lost five people. Three of them were elders so that’s maybe to be expected, but their wisdom is missed. Their memories of when the Wapiti were a proud nation too. That casts some gloom here still. 

You can imagine it’s tough on Rains Fall. I think he’d like it if you would write him. He asked about you when I said I’d gotten your letter. Hearing you are OK and healing, even if it is slow, seems to have done him some good.

I never knew much about the Kiowa, my mother’s people. We left them too young. So having the Wapiti has done me some good. They’re not the same tribe, but it seems many things are the same. They don’t have much, Arthur, but they have their traditions and their pride, where they can. So I’ll listen to their stories. I’ll remember for them when they’re gone. That’s the best way I know to honor a way of life that’s been lost.

We ain’t heard from the Canadian government due to the winter, but I expect we shall hear from them now that it’s spring. Guess we’ll see what they think about us coming into their country and taking up residence. Rains Fall plans to ask for asylum, given the seizure of the reservation in Ambarino. Their reputation is for less violence and more fairness than the American government but that’s not really saying much.

Keep writing, brother. It’s good to hear from you.  
Charles

 **Letter from Charles to Sadie**  
Sadie,  
I got the information on where you were when Arthur wrote me. I know you and me didn’t get much chance to talk when we rode with the gang, but I always respected you. Also seemed strange that I would only write to him and shut you out. You was one of us too. So write me or not as you like, and we can talk about the bad old days, or whatever.

Hope you are doing well. I know you had your share of bad things happen before it all went crazy. Hope you’re managing to keep Arthur doing what he needs to get well. You and me both know he’s not good at looking out for himself. But I suspect if anyone can make that happen, it’s going to be you. 

I heard a tale told around the fire here a few nights ago. Back in ‘76, there was a Wapiti warrior named Bison Caller. He got badly wounded in a battle with Army soldiers while defending the village. His wife, who was named Butterfly at the time, grabbed a horse, charged into the battle. She got him on her horse and back to safety. They called her Charges The Soldiers after that. She and Bison Caller fought side by side in every battle after that until the Wapiti gave up fighting.

They still tell her story. Because to them, courage to face the enemy to rescue someone wounded and helpless is worth stories. They’d admire your courage in what you did for Arthur that night, and beyond. I know he does. I know I do.

Be well,  
Charles


	10. Las Hermanas: Bridge Over Troubled Waters

He’d seen enough of his fellow patients in the last six months to know when someone was fading out. Saw the look of it in himself, especially that last time in Valentine. Got a bath, dressed himself nicely. Went and had a shot of whiskey, and paid the poor barkeep at Smithfield’s well for the trouble he’d caused over the summer, between the brawl with Tommy and that crazy night with Lenny, and then that fight with the drunk shithead with the coonskin cap talking crap about Indians as he had. Looking up into the mirror across from the barber’s chair, hair neatly cut and face neatly shaved, but that couldn’t hide how pale and thin he was. Like a ghost fading from visibility by inches. He’d readied himself to die. Readied himself to be buried, at that, trying to look as neat as he could. 

He saw that washed-out, nearly transparent look now in Marion Davies. She was maybe close to sixty, and before the TB came on in, he imagined she’d looked younger than her years. No family here. Told him her sister and brother-in-law were up in West Virginia, along with their kids. Never married, never had much interest in it, so she’d taught school. Spent six months here, got released two years ago, and now here she’d come back from West Virginia, wracked by the TB all over again. She’d gotten here a week ago.

She had enough strength still to go out to the courtyard--barely. Some folks avoided her, as if it were too much to confront the reality that they might hope to walk out that convent gate someday with Garcia’s clearance, but there would never be guaranteed safety. Some stopped by, especially the long-termers who remembered her.

Him, he’d started talking to her because she was alone, and dying, and that tugged at him in far too familiar a way. Plus that sing-song lilt to her voice told him what he needed to know before he ever heard her name. Sat down and introduced himself, and she’d brightened to her a Welsh surname, even if it was one loaned from Sadie.

One grey-blue eye peeked open as he sat down beside her cot, and she gave a slight smile. “Ah, there’s my dear fellow.”

“Don’t know that I’d call myself ‘dear’, but sure.” He looked behind him, seeing nobody else nearby at the minute. Ramona Trujillo was closest, and she was caught up chatting with her husband Francisco, obviously on his way to the stables. “Can I ask you something?” 

“Of course.”

“Where in Wales you come from? Your people, I mean. You got the accent and all.”

“Merthyr Tydfil,” she answered. “Near Cardiff, it was. We come over when I was nineteen when Gladys and Alun married. Just before the war.” She eyed him with more interest now, a bit of a lively spark in her eye. “ _Wyt t’in siarad Cymraeg, bachgen? O ble wyt t’in dod?_ ”

Already juggling Spanish as he was, and it had been over twenty-five years now since he’d heard Welsh spoken, the gears of processing those words turned slower than he’d like. But he got it in the end. Asking if he spoke Welsh, where he was from too. His answer was halting to start, grasping hard for words he hadn’t had to use since he was a small child, like pulling each one out from a pile of junk and trying to scrape the rust off and polish it up. “ _Dw i’n deall....ond araf, os gwelwch yn dda._ ” Telling her he got it, but to go at speaking it slower so he could better understand. “My folk come from Rhondda Valley. I was born there. Don’t rightly know the village name, at that. We come over when I was real little, just after the war. I don’t remember that, not really.” Only a few flickers from the boat ride to Guarma, and living in coal country up near Annesburg, that must have been from all that, but like that memory of the train and the horses, nothing too certain. “And my folks died when I was young. But yeah, they spoke it around each other.”

“Well, boy, if it’s your mother tongue, or one of them at any rate, I wouldn’t mind helping you polish it up again, just a bit.”

He almost said he wasn’t sure he had much use for speaking Welsh, given he hadn’t much found a need for it in twenty years, though granted, some of that was in not wanting to explain things to Hosea and Dutch when he’d claimed he was pure New Austin. But then stopped himself, realizing what she was really about. His mother and father, poorly matched as they’d been, had spoken it to each other, kept that small tie of something comfortingly familiar. Marion Davies was here in Mexico, and would almost definitely die here this time. Her family were in West Virginia, and she obviously didn’t want them to watch her die that she’d come here to do it. He could sympathize with the painful dignity of that choice. But perhaps it would be a comfort all the same for her to hear that familiar sound of home on her way out, even if it was a clumsy half-butchered version of it from a man who couldn’t speak English all that well. “ _Diolch yn fawr._ I could ask you another favor, if you’re up to it.”

“What’s that, then?”

“I know the sound of it. Can speak it, sort of. But I learned to read years after my folks was dead. So I expect I’d make more of a mess of writing it than I do my English. I’d rather learn to do that proper.” She’d been a schoolteacher. Give her one more pupil to teach, some small point of pride in being able to pass some kind of knowledge on at the last.

She gave a thoughtful nod, though the shrewd look in her eyes said she’d caught on to what he was doing. “‘I’ve a few books in Welsh. Old stories, they are, but maybe that would help.”

“That it would.”

That earned a more genuine smile on her tired face. “Very well, then. But you’ve better things to do for the rest of the day than listen to an old woman’s chatter. There’s that little wife of yours. Go spend some time with the woman you should be minding.”

He looked back over his shoulder to see Sadie playing with the Trujillos’ girls. Baby Gabriela was only about two, maybe three, but Monica had to be eight or nine. He wondered what Monica made of this place. But like the cats were a welcome thing, he’d noticed the patients tended to dote on the kids, because a few came here with young families. Much like they had Jack in camp, it felt like all of them were moved to protect this small precious bit of innocence from the grim reality of their existence. Monica had to be more than old enough to maybe wonder where a few of those aunts and uncles had gone, and he wondered what Ramona and Francisco told her. Was she old enough to really hear about death? He could still remember Jack innocently asking if Mac was in jail. God, the poor kid. Especially the time he’d had of it last year, given they couldn’t shield him from all of it by any means. He wondered if Jack’s dreams were anything like as haunted as his, or Sadie’s. Hard to avoid both of them knowing it when they shared a room.

Giving Marion a nod of acknowledgment, recognizing he’d been given more or less an order, he headed over. Tried to put the dark thoughts aside, crouching down beside Monica. “Now, what might you three fine ladies be doing here?” The Spanish still caused him a headache sometimes, but it was becoming much easier. Having it pounded into his thick skull two hours a day for near six months now, even he had to see some result.

“Playing,” Monica said, giving him a quick, shy smile. “Mama’s taking a rest, and Aunt Sadie’s teaching me how to read music.”

“Is she now!” He looked at the paper, the lines and notes--well, that was a language he couldn’t touch. He’d been learning guitar from Juan Veracruz in trade for drawing lessons, but that was all doing it by ear, not by reading music. But clearly Sadie knew her share about that. “Well, that’s really something.”

Her eyes sparkled with excitement. “Mother Miguela says I can start to learn to play the piano!”

“That’d be real fine, I bet. You’ll be one proper lady by the time your momma’s well.”

Ramona laughed at that, sitting there watching her girls play. She looked good these days, her face and body round and full again. He suspected she’d be on her way out the gate soon enough. Her dark eyes flashed merrily. “I appreciate the help, and both of you are lovely with children. Best to get some practice for when you have your own, right?”

He saw Sadie awkwardly stiffen up at that, just as he felt the cold shiver work its way down his spine. Oh, he’d had his own, all right, and done poor little for him. As for Sadie, he’d seen how sweet she was around Jack, but he didn’t know the full story there--there had been no child there when the O’Driscolls came, but that didn’t mean there never had been. They’d been up there over two and a half years, her and Jake. More than long enough to have a child and then lose them. Had there been a tiny grave, maybe even two, hidden deep beneath those snows, left now to the protection of their father? Or children lost even before they came into the world? It struck him hard to realize as close as they were, he didn’t know something like that. But then, she didn’t know about Isaac either. Some things were both that important but too close to the heart, and it felt almost like they got harder to talk about the longer things went on, and the tighter the ties drew between them as friends. Big things like Eliza and Isaac, like his time enduring the tender mercies of the O’Driscolls, they became secrets all knotted up inside, rather than things simply not shared yet.

Ramona obviously sensed she’d stepped into a pile of shit there. “I’m sorry, I didn’t realize. You’re older, of course you’ve been...or maybe you lost...”

Lord. Now she was assuming given neither he nor Sadie was a spring chicken that they’d been married forever, tried and tried for children, and just come up disappointed. Or else they’d had a kid and lost them. That had happened to Hosea and Bessie, given the one time she’d spoken of it, when he was sixteen or so. _Oh, Hosea and me always wanted kids. We lost a few along the way. One who almost made it long enough to be born. A little boy. But you’re our son now, and I’m thinking we couldn’t ask for better._ She’d had a way about her, Bessie. Never making him feel like he was some cheap replacement for the kids she didn’t have already. 

Seeing Sadie still silent with her own thoughts, he tried to step in and patch it over as best he could for all of them. “It’s no problem, Ramona. Sadie was a widow when we met, and that wasn’t but a few months before I got the TB. No chance for us to think about all that, I guess.”

Sadie chimed in, steady as a rock now. But he could read the look of gratitude she gave him for trying to give her back that small piece of the truth for her to claim. “But you’ve got some sweet ones here for sure.” She gestured to Monica and Gabriela.

Ramona’s awkwardly apologetic expression eased, and she smiled, the expression lighting up her whole face and making something beautiful of it. “Not always so sweet, I tell you. But worth it, yes.”

He glanced over at Sadie. “I was thinking of heading to the river this afternoon. Going fishing a bit.”

“Yeah?” She nodded at that, pushing up to her feet and dusting off her pants. Everyone had long since given up commenting on them. “You should be able to manage that, just about.” That was about what he figured. It was a bit of a ride to the river, but Buell could use the exercise, and fishing was restful enough if it didn’t involve wrestling huge sturgeon or the like. Far better than than hunting, anyway. “Let’s go, then.”

Buell practically bounced with excitement as Arthur put on his tack, leading him from the stable. He still needed corral time to burn off the rest of his energy, but at least they got out for rides regularly enough now. Short ones of an hour at most, and minimal galloping, which frustrated both of them. But it was progress. Better to stay close anyway rather than venturing out alone, given the report of more of those Del Lobo boys kept coming from Punta Orgullo. He could recognize a slowly growing gang when he saw it, and that old prickling sense of danger didn’t much like that. But he was out of that business anyway. No need to be ready to fight to defend scores from being stolen. Though what he’d heard of the Del Lobos, he didn’t much like. 

Overall, things were still improving, week by week, month by month. He wouldn’t say he’d begun to exactly make firm plans for the future, given so much of that still scared the hell out of him, but there was cause to consider more than his exit from the world by this point. But for now, fishing for the afternoon was about as big a thing as he wanted to consider.

The nuisance about the desert was lack of water, of course, and that included fishing spots. So to the banks of the San Luis River they went, near Ramita de la Baya, the footbridge across the river. Strange to spot American territory again for the first time in six months. Leaving Buell and Bob to graze in the scrub, they headed down the bank towards the water. Took a few minutes to just rest up once they got there before doing anything else, because he could feel the first tugs of fatigue on him. He sensed Sadie right there, keeping a watchful eye on him as he sat on the riverbank, doing nothing but watching the flow of the water, focusing on breathing, resting up. It felt comforting now, knowing she wasn’t there to comment on it, and that if he couldn’t do something she wouldn’t take it hard. She was only worried, and watching over him. 

Feeling better, he gave her a slight nod to let her know he’d be all right, and turned to the fishing tackle. “Fishing ain’t gonna be as good as Ambarino, I’m sure,” he said, prepping the fishing rod with a lure, and casting in, sitting down on the slope of the bank. “Caught one hell of a salmon up there in Lake Isabella.” 

“You actually _caught_ that monster?” Sadie sat down near him, far enough away to cast without snarling lines, but staying in the cool shade of a cottonwood. “Damn, I had it on the line twice, almost got it to shore once! Bastard snapped the line both times.”

Almost a pity to pull a fish like that from the water and send it to that pretentious idiot Jeremy Gill, but he’d told himself every little bit helped the gang stay afloat a little bit longer in the end. “I had a good teacher. You fish when you was a kid that you could go after a catch like that?” 

“No, guess it was the lack of knowledge that got me. Jake and me learned it from books and a trapper fella we put up for the night once. Too far a ride to the San Luis from Tumbleweed since we didn’t get much free time as kids,” she said, dealing with her own fishing rod. For not having much formal teaching, she looked confident enough. “Always something to do on a farm, especially one as is failing slowly.” 

He nodded to acknowledge that. “I didn’t when I was a kid. My daddy, well, he sure put me to work. Then when I was on my own--no time for nothing but just surviving. All that free time after Dutch and Hosea found me? That was an adjustment. I was about bouncing off the walls after that first winter in Montana. Frustrated and frustrating little shit, I was. Needed something to do. So Hosea, when that spring come, he took me fishing. First thing he taught me was reading and writing, given it was a long winter, but fishing, that was the second.” 

He could hear the smile in her voice as she answered, “That’s nice. So you two go fishing a lot?”

“No. I made a real poor student on fishing then, I’m afraid. Hunting too, when he tried to teach me that. I didn’t have much patience. Didn’t see much sense in sitting around waiting for something to happen. Me, I was out to _make_ things happen. It’s funny. Dutch, he taught me shooting, riding too since he’d been taught all them tricks by a cavalryman. Hosea taught me reading, hunting, fishing. I look back at that now, seems they was trying to teach me their ways of doing things in life too.”

He’d been Dutch’s boy in that, wanting to rush right out and seize the opportunities, rather than Hosea’s way of putting out the bait and carefully, patiently waiting for something to come calling. He hadn’t seen the wisdom in that gentler way directly, though hadn’t he always been relieved to work with Hosea on some scam full of his brilliant bullshit, to be able to be something other than the fearsome strong-arm throwing people around and growling threats at them? Sure, maybe sometimes he’d been cast as a mute idiot or whatever, and that one memorable time he was seventeen Hosea actually stuck him in a dress, but it had always been an adventure. He never left those jobs feeling sick or troubled in his soul. 

Seeing Sadie’s cast needed some work, he gave her a few pointers, trying to not smile as he could almost hear Hosea telling them to him. Eventually, she reeled in a nice trout, and stuck it in the bag. “Hosea was real kind to me, especially early on. He’d lost his Bessie, so he knew what it was like for me with Jake.” 

“I can imagine that. All he wanted in the end was to make sure we was all right.” No luck on his own cast that time, so he hitched up to his knees, casting out again, settling back down.

“What was it that was wrong with his lungs? If it ain’t too forward to ask.”

“Shit, you asked him, he’d have told it to you straight. Cancer. He’d had it near four years by then. Dutch and I both thought the escape from Blackwater would kill him. He knew it would do for him in the end, just wasn’t sure exactly when. Doctor said it would kill him in six months, but Hosea was stubborn.”

She didn’t answer for what felt like a long, long time. “You must have missed him, after you got back. Especially with your own troubles with the TB.”

She ventured close to dangerous territory there, because he could feel the lump rising in his throat. Sometimes those nightmares still had visions of Hosea in them, dead among the litter and refuse of a St. Denis street. “Yeah,” he managed. The struggle for breath had nothing to do with disease in that moment. “He...maybe he could have got through to Dutch.” He’d tried, truly he had, but things were too set in stone with them, and every time he tried to protest, he’d felt Dutch’s surprise and irritation, as if Arthur had overthrown the natural order even by questioning.

“Maybe. But that ain’t what I meant. I meant you missed _him_.”

He did. Only now, far too late, did he see things so much more clearly. How Hosea had tried so hard to carve out space to make him take a break, going to go hunt that bear, and saying they’d claim they’d been scoping out a job. Pulling him along on those nonsense jobs of his, maybe to take the sting out of the increasing violence of Dutch’s jobs. Once again teaching him the skills their desperate situation needed, the skills he’d ignored and treated so nonchalantly nearly twenty years ago as an impatient boy--hunting, fishing, bait-making, making medicines. All the things that let Arthur survive out in the wilds, and let him help their family survive.

He’d shoved book after book at Arthur as a kid, telling him, _Reading what other people have to say is useful, son, but you do that enough, you start asking your own questions. And then you become able to think for yourself._ Encouraging him to think, to question, and he’d been the loyal brother and friend to Dutch to the point he would never have openly challenged him and turned it into a civil war or a coup, but he’d heard Hosea talking around the campfire, questioning Dutch in his tent, protesting that they’d turned into something dark and terrible, urging all of them who would listen to open their eyes and realize where this runaway train was headed. Trying over and over to get John to take Abigail and Jack and run, to step up, to be a man and a husband and a father.

But he’d been too-loyal Arthur, until it was far too late, and Dutch was already lost to them, if he’d ever been able to be swayed. Even then Hosea, dead and gone, had one last lesson to teach with the example he’d set. How to accept the inevitable without rage or bitterness. How to face a slow and painful end with courage, even with nearly every breath he took hurting. How to give what strength remained to try to see to the safety and comfort of others, to give that prolonged and agonizing exit some meaning and dignity by trying to save those he loved. Hosea had taught him so many things, but without a word directly spoken about it, he’d shown Arthur how to try and die with grace. He’d needed that so much at Beaver Hollow, without Hosea himself there. 

Much as it hurt, he thought of those final moments, and the certainty blossomed inside of him. “Charles tell you what happened with the bank, with Hosea?”

“Some of it. Hosea got captured--can’t say I’m unhappy that bastard Milton is dead--and Dutch tried to negotiate. Then Milton shot him down in the street.”

He had another realization then. “I think Micah must have ratted us out even then. Milton was right there to catch Hosea, blocks from the bank? Don’t seem a coincidence.” He shook his head. “Anyway. Yeah, Milton pushed him into the street. He started walking towards us. But then he stopped. He turned back towards Milton. He knew what was gonna happen. That this was his death. And he looked it right in the eye.” In that last moment, all that uncertainty, the fearful hunch of his shoulders, vanished away like dissipating gunsmoke. Hosea had turned to face his death, straight-backed and fearless.

“So did you,” Sadie told him, voice low and soft.

So he had. Maybe he’d learned one last lesson there. “Yes. I missed him coming back from Guarma. I miss him now. I expect I always shall.” He’d tried so hard to impress Dutch, only realizing now exactly how much the man dangled it like a carrot, voicing his alternating praise and doubts in that silken way he had, keeping Arthur always anxious, always hungry, always striving so Goddamn hard to be worthy to earn that love and approval. Hosea had loved him without demands. The more he thought on it, it felt like he’d been more of Hosea’s son than Dutch’s, all along. Oh, less of a raconteur and silver-tongued rogue, awkward as he was, but it was all there. The thoughts about the world and his place in it, violence in his past, the desire to do as little harm as possible, and the crippling doubts and the certainty of being a bad man, the faithfulness in love if only the right woman gave him a chance. _Oh, you was a con man, Hosea, sure, but you had a good heart. Maybe if you ain’t met Dutch things would have been different for you too. You and Bessie should have had those kids, and you should have gone old and grey surrounded by a whole mess of grandkids. Died at peace in your sleep after telling the whole lot of them one last bit of funny nonsense. But life ain’t fair. Plenty of folk don’t get what they deserve. We all knew that._ He wished Hosea was here now, because he suspected the man would have a whole lot more to say, now that he knew Arthur was finally of a mind to hear it. “But he loved fishing. I couldn’t appreciate it then. The patience you need for it. Guess I can now, and fishing, well, it’s a good way to remember him.”

She let it go at that, and the silence was comfortable enough for a while. They added a few more fish to the bag, which Sister Ursula would appreciate. He wiped his brow with the back of his hand, because even their patch of shade was getting a bit hotter. “Damn, it’s getting hot. No wonder folk take a _siesta_ in the afternoon.”

“It’s only May. Gonna get a lot hotter by July and August. You missed out on learning that when you left New Austin so young.” He could hear the smug amusement in her voice in that, and just smiled to himself at it. 

“Too bad there ain’t nowhere good to swim in Perdido except the river. Got some current to it, at least right here. I probably ain’t up to it this year.” ” He’d seen how his line reacted to the water’s rapid flow, had to adjust for it already in the fishing. 

“Can’t swim anyway,” she said with a reluctant sigh. “Like I said with fishing, wasn’t nowhere nearby, no spare time either. And Jake couldn’t swim, so I couldn’t teach him, and he couldn’t teach me. Plus Lake Isabella and the like was always so damn cold anyway.”

No mistaking that. He’d caught that salmon probably fully in July with the water still icy cold.“There’s another thing Hosea taught me in Montana--swimming. John never took to it. He was always scared shitless when it came to the water. He made an even worse fisherman than me, I suppose, but he loved going hunting with Hosea. Anyway, you wanna learn, maybe we put that on the list for next summer.”

She chuckled, reeling in her hook. “Gotta say, Arthur, it’s good to hear you thinking about next year.”

“I gotta start to think like that. Or else I ain’t never getting anywhere, I suppose.” 

“Just about. All right, a deal’s a deal.” She held out her hand to him, eyes alight with merriment. “You agree to stay alive, and I agree you get to teach me to swim next summer.”

“What, you want me to spit on that shake too?” he joked, even as he reached out and took her hand in his, shaking it to seal the deal, then letting go. Perhaps it was just the power of superstition, but it felt meaningful that his surviving to next summer was all tied up in a promise now, not just hopes. “Done and done.”

Though the fact it was mid-May gave him pause. He had his own unhappy anniversary here, and so did she. He hated to bring it up, and puncture the good mood they had going, but it felt too dishonest if he ignored it. She was his friend, by now easily his best friend, and that meant not just enjoying the good stuff. “It’s the 12th today.” Jake had died on the 15th.

“Yes,” she said, and he felt the cautious retreat, the careful distance suddenly in her eyes and her tone. There was a sudden stiffness in her shoulders, a ramrod straightness to her back rather than the easy relaxation that had been there moments before. 

“If you...Sadie, I know it’s rough. But can’t imagine it’ll be easier over the next few days with it being a year since...all that. You need to be alone, you tell me. I can sleep on the rooftop, even.”

She looked away, far into the distance, across the riverbank towards America. Then she closed her eyes. Heart and thoughts probably not in New Austin, but long miles away in the northern reaches of Ambarino. “Thank you, Arthur,” and he barely heard her, because her words were so soft. “You don’t need to go sleeping on the roof. But...thank you. And thanks for what you said to Ramona. About Jake. That...”

“Of course. Look, you’re stuck in this. That don’t mean I have to make it harder on you.” It felt like such a little thing, to give her the ability to claim Jake again, even if she still didn’t have the right to her grief back given she’d supposedly gotten over him and remarried. But at least he’d managed to pull the man’s existence, and his marriage to her, back into reality. That felt like something.

She sighed, did the reel up one last time, and laid her rod down beside her on the bank. Tucked her knees up towards her chest, draping her arms over them. “Wasn’t Ramona’s fault. The thing about the kids. She meant it well. Jake and me, well, we wanted them. We both wanted them real bad. But not when we couldn’t even afford to get married, and then up in the Grizzlies we had to put it off even more until we got the place settled better. We was talking about last year being the year, maybe this year at worst.”

His heart ached for her at that. One more thing taken from her--her husband, her home, her hopes of kids. If not for the O’Driscolls, she’d be at home in Ambarino right now with that man she adored, and maybe even pregnant or with a child already right now. From the way she huddled in on herself a little tighter, he suspected she had to be thinking of those ruined dreams and the life she now had instead. “I should have figured that. I seen how you was with Jack.” He should have recognized that same longing in her for something that now couldn’t be. “For what it’s worth, I think you’d have been one hell of a momma.”

She let out a sound halfway between a laugh and a sob, wiping her arm across her eyes quickly, but her breathing stayed even. “Don’t think I didn’t see how you was always real sweet to Jack. You was better to that boy than John for sure. You’d have made one hell of a daddy yourself, I’d say.” 

There it was now, the fear gently closing him within its grasp. Was it really fair to tell her that he’d been so terrible as a father himself, that he’d had what she wanted and valued it so little that he threw it away? But all the same, hadn’t he told himself that being her friend meant more than just the good? Besides, it had been ten years, and he’d told almost nobody. Hosea, Bessie, Dutch, and Susan had been the only ones who knew, and of those, Dutch was the only one alive, and he doubted his former mentor gave a shit. He’d always considered Isaac little more than a distraction. _Playing house like that with a woman who made it clear she ain’t willing to marry you, son, you’re doing them no favors. Better you let her go to have a clean start._ Eliza and Isaac truly existed only in his memories now, much as Jake did for her, and maybe he owed them better than that. He’d pulled Jake back into reality for her by acknowledging him. He should do the same to them, even as it showed him at his most shameful and ugliest. They didn’t deserve to be forgotten because it hurt him to talk about it. 

For a moment as he glanced down the riverbank, he thought he could almost see a tiny dark-haired boy, bored already with fishing lessons, laughing and splashing in the shallows of a different river. _Fishing’s no fun, come play, Pa!_ He’d just laughed at that and given in, because he’d agreed then that fishing wasn’t much fun, but it made for something safe and special to do with a little boy just a couple weeks shy of four years old. Promised Isaac that they’d do something different when he came to visit after his birthday. So maybe Isaac had gotten something from him after all. How he hoped maybe what his son had gotten had been the best of Arthur Morgan, because God knew what came after was sure as hell the worst. But Isaac was dead so now he would never know what that had been, or who he could have become.

_A few folk in town had been very helpful to poor grieving Arthur McCready. Tragic, losing his wife and his little boy like that. And those four bastards--nobody seemed to know their name--had caused their share of trouble over the last few weeks after coming into the area. Finding that cabin had been almost too easy. Just a little over an hour long ride from Warrenton._

_He’d been good enough as a boy to dip pockets and sneak away undetected. Those stealthy skills translated easily to slipping through the dark silently. He caught one on his way to the outhouse out near the tree line, grabbed him, slit his throat. Caught another feeding his horse and gave him the same treatment, soothing the horse with a few low words. Kicked in the door on the other two, and shot one dead before he could even get up from the table. Grabbed the last one, slammed him back into his chair, and bound him there--big fucker he was, and yet Arthur saw the way this idiot looked at him, eyes wide. Confronted by the specter of a blood spattered murderous devil breaking down the door to do violence. Only fair, given that was exactly what they’d done to Eliza’s home._

_Pushing aside a plate of venison steak and potatoes to clear a space, he leaned on the edge of the table near the trussed-up man, keeping his voice calm and low, even as much as he wanted to beat this man to death right that instant. Kept his revolver visible in his hand, with the implied threat of it. “Was it your gang here who went robbing last week at a cabin near Eagle’s Bluff?”_

_A crafty expression intermingled with the terror. “OK, I get it. You want answers. You a bounty hunter? I talk, you gonna bring me in alive? Bounty’s always better for a living man.”_

_He gave a slight shrug. “Can’t hurt your chances. So, how about it?”_

_“It was all Mike’s idea! Said it was remote enough, worth checking out.”_

_He leaned in, lowered his voice to the most menacing growl he could muster. “Didn’t ask whose idea it was. Whoever’s idea it was, their brains ain’t busy having any Goddamn ideas now, cause they’re dead. I asked if you was there.”_

_He sighed, obviously seeing there was no point in denying it. “Yeah. Yeah, we was there. Look, it wasn’t nothing worth it. Ten bucks was all they had anyway.”_

_So Eliza had been getting low, even as hard as she worked and much as she saved. Ten dollars. That was this bastard’s regret. A ten dollar take. Not the two lives they’d snuffed out casually as grinding out a cigarette underfoot. The rage surged up within him again until he swore he saw red at the edges of his vision, and before he thought better of it, he reached out and punched him, feeling the satisfying crunch of his nose breaking. “You pieces of shit murdered a woman and a little boy, it don’t fucking **matter** what the take was!”_

_His eyes widened, obviously seeing how he’d miscalculated. “They was yours? Mister, I didn’t--” No, they hadn’t been his. Not entirely. Eliza had built that wall and he couldn’t blame her for it. But they’d been enough his to be alone out in the woods when these monsters went looking for a quick score. Arthur raised his gun, suddenly calm as anything, like the anger got so great it became a blackness swallowing everything. Pointed it right between the man’s eyes. “You ain’t gonna shoot me! You can’t! Please, I’ll do anything.”_

_Coward. Big man when facing a woman and her tiny son, but get a man in there who was a threat and he sniveled. Pissed himself too, if the acrid smell was any judge. “She beg like that? Or the boy? Or did you shoot them before they could beg?” Silence was the only reply. He gave the robber another punch to encourage some talking. “Answer me! And don’t give me no lies.”_

_The man’s head slumped down to his cheat in defeat. His voice, when it came out, was little more than a mumble. “She was doing her best to keep the kid quiet. Begged for us to spare the boy. Said she’d do anything. We knew what she meant by that. Mike said we didn’t have no time for that, that she’d seen our faces anyway. That’s the truth.”_

_“Well, then, that’s that.” The click of the hammer felt loud as a gunshot itself in the charged air in that tiny room. The lantern on the table flickered and dimmed, almost out of kerosene. No matter. He’d be done and gone before that became a problem. Because he wouldn’t search this place in order to take anything from it. He was a robber and a killer himself, yes, but he couldn’t stand the idea of looting anything from these animals. The mere thought of it made him sick._

_“You said--”_

_Revenge was a fool’s errand, so he kept hearing. Yeah, well, Dutch had his own little blood feud with Colm thanks to Annabelle, so to Arthur’s mind, the man could hardly talk lofty words about not pursuing vengeance. It had been either track these animals down and take care of them, or point the gun at himself because he couldn’t bear to be in his own head, living in his own skin right now. Though there was no saying he might not still do that anyway, because some part of him already knew this wouldn’t change anything, that they were the killers but he was the Goddamn problem. All he was doing by this was openly admitting and embracing that. But he didn’t care. “I said it couldn’t hurt your chances.” He looked down into the man’s eyes. “You can’t get more hurt than none. You get the same chances you gave them.” Then he pulled the trigger._

He ended up staring across to river himself now, towards Wyoming. Wanting to remember and not remember, all at once, because ten years still felt like yesterday. Knowing Sadie had seen that wanting in him, knowing that wanting still lived in him like an ache that just couldn’t quit. But he had no right to it, not after how he’d had that chance for a wife and a family if only he’d done right by them, and instead he’d failed so terribly. “I had a son, once. And you’re wrong. I wasn’t much good to him at all.”

~~~~~~~~~~

She wasn’t sure she’d heard him correctly at first, surprised as she was. He had a son? That was big news for her to have never had any hint of it. But then she thought about how he was around Jack. Sweet and gentle, not nearly so awkward as he was around most people. Like he knew a thing or two about it already.

Then his words sank in more. He’d _had_ one. So the boy was dead, or lost to him somehow. She shouldn’t pry, given it had to be nothing but pain all the same, but he’d offered that up. Seeing him sitting there, she had the sense that he wanted to say some things, even as the hunch of his shoulders said he was afraid of it. “What was his name, your son?”

“Isaac,” and she could hear a whole world of grief in that name. 

“What happened?” She couldn't help but imagine a little boy, maybe with Arthur's eyes, or that shy half-smile of his. With that name, that boy became a reality, though one that was now apparently gone.

“I know how you women talk, so I’ll guess someone told you that me and a girl named Mary had something once.”

Yes, she’d heard about that. Grimshaw grumbling about some high and mighty miss who Arthur apparently loved hopelessly. _Marries some other man, breaks his heart, shows up after fifteen years, crooks her finger and bats her eyelashes and says she needs help, and what does that idiot man do? Drops everything to run to her!_ It was one of the few times she’d liked the woman, seeing how protective she was of Arthur. They’d had their share of conversation about Mary Linton _nee_ Gillis around the womens’ wagon, true. Abigail was about the only charitable one hoping it would work out this time, but they’d all sensed that was because she needed so much to believe that loving enough would solve everything, given her own situation with John. The rest of them had been more skeptical.

“I heard a bit,” she said. “Guess I’d rather hear the truth from you, though. What, you and her had a kid?” That was a surprise. High and mighty proper girls didn’t have babies with men they didn’t marry.

“No, I…” He hesitated, reeling in his line and undoing the tackle. She kept silent, wanting to prod him, sensing this was something crucial, but because it was such a big thing, he couldn’t put words to it easily. “We met when we was just kids ourselves. I was nineteen. And--when I was with her it was like I could see a way for everything in my life to be different. I guess she saw the same in me.”

She nodded. “Proper girl, outlaw boy. You was looking for a way out from your lives, and you saw that in each other, right?”

He glanced over at her, a flicker of surprise in his eyes. “Just about. And it works out in them romances of Mary-Beth’s. But us, Mary and me? It would all make sense, we’d be talking about this life we’d have and it was all sweet and fine, and then five minutes later she’s criticizing the way I talk and I’m pissed at her for being such a damn snob looking down on me. It was either perfect dreams or fighting like cats and dogs with us.”

“Because you was each other’s escape, Arthur. But you can’t run from everything. You can’t build a life on that, because you still gotta live with each other at the end of the day. From what the gals was saying, I don’t see her hunting a deer, helping build a hog pen, or anything like that.”

He gave off a short laugh at that. “Don’t see her shooting no O’Driscolls, that’s true. I guess that’s why the dream stuck all these years. We both still wanted out. Still talking wild notions of running away together. But we still didn’t much like each other. I knew it wasn’t right, but...she was all I had. And back then, it seemed like it might be OK. We wasn’t engaged, not quite, but we had what she called an ‘understanding’. That we’d try to work things out and she’d get her family to approve of me, and I’d try to be a bit better than a no-account outlaw. We wasn’t quite sure how that could happen, but I gave her a ring. Then...in ‘85, we went east to Illinois. Found John there, about ready to get himself hanged by a mob for stealing. Twelve years old, he was. I ain’t proud to say I didn’t take well to Dutch and Hosea taking him in. Got real scared, I guess, that he was their boy now and they wouldn’t need me around no more. So when we got back to California, I went out, started chasing bigger jobs, rougher jobs. Trying to prove myself. Dutch, he loved that. Said it was me finally finding my place.”

Sadie shook her head, sighing. “Yeah, of course he did.” He’d probably thrived off pitting the two of them against each other, at that.

“Mary found out about all that quick enough. Told me I’d gotten worse, not better, and her daddy had found a proper husband for her. Tried to give back that ring. I told her to keep it. We ended up in Wyoming that summer. I’m in this tired little mining town, don’t even remember the name now. Three drinks in, feeling damn sorry for myself. The waitress, she’s real nice. Young. Pretty as hell. Dark hair, like Mary. Listening to me talk whatever crap I was talking and being kind about it.”

Now Sadie could see where this was going. “What was her name?”

“Eliza McCready. She was nineteen then.” He said it with the familiarity of having the name on his tongue often enough, back then, but there was a hush to it too, as if he was afraid to say it too loudly. “We ended up having a few drinks together after her shift was done. Talking a bit. And we was both young and stupid and lonely and drunk, so…we done what we done. I woke up with a hell of a hangover and pretty ashamed of myself, so I was gone before dawn. Thought that was for the best and we both ought to pretend that didn’t happen, especially given we both was drunk enough to not really remember anything anyway. Spent the winter in Oregon, and John and I made our peace, but headed back that way the next spring, so I come on back to apologize for sneaking out like that. I find Eliza and she’s scared and seven months pregnant. No pretending or apologizing that away.”

He wouldn’t look at her as he was talking. She felt the slow kindle of anger within her. She’d wanted kids with Jake so much, waited for them, put them off. Arthur? He’d gotten drunk, slept once with a girl he didn’t even really want except as a reminder of the girl who’d broken his heart, and knocked her up. The unfairness of it all took her breath away for a moment. “Nobody talked about her in the gang, so I’m guessing we didn’t take her in.” Had he really just abandoned her? That didn’t seem like him at all. But maybe he’d been very different as a younger man.

“I tried,” he protested. “God, that poor girl. I got the shock of my life when I saw her belly, she got the shock of hers when I told her who I was and what my life was. Eliza didn’t want none of that life. Even when I told her I’d marry her, that she’d be safe with us, that she’d have Bessie and Susan to look after her and help her. She said she might have been a waitress, but she had her principles. She didn’t want that life for her, or our kid.”

Sadie had to admit to a sudden respect for this Eliza McCready, even if there was some brave, foolish youthful naivete to saying she’d go it alone. The easiest thing to do would have been to marry, no matter what, and accept whatever terms a man gave her. Given all that Eliza knew of Arthur Morgan at that point was that he was an outlaw and the man who knocked her up, she guessed she couldn’t much blame a scared girl-woman had tried to stick to what she knew rather than trust him. “So what did you do with that?”

“What could I do? Kidnap her and force her to marry me? Jesus! I said I’d do for them what I could, then. Helped her move to a new place, where folk didn’t know her. Little cabin, out in the woods, just like she’d had as a kid back in Tennessee. I stopped by whenever I could to give them some money, spend a few days with the boy. I claimed to be Mr. McCready, and she told folk I was away a lot on cattle drives and the like. We was friendly, especially for Isaac’s sake, but that one night was all there ever was between us. I always slept on a pallet on the floor. That way she was a respectable married woman around town, but if she ever met a fella she did want, she could claim she was a widow and be free of me easy enough.”

“That what happened? She met someone and told you the boy wasn’t yours no more?” It would have come eventually, she supposed. They couldn’t live that lie forever. A tiny boy would grow up enough to ask inconvenient questions. “Did they move away, then?” Was that boy out there somewhere, even now? He’d be, what, fourteen now? 

“I wish to God it had been that. I was coming to visit. Except when I got there, I find two fresh graves and two crosses outside that cabin. Isaac, he’d turned four on May 19th. Died on the 22nd. I got there on the 27th to do something for his birthday. I go to town, and find out they’d been robbed. Killed. Her boss at the saloon found them and buried them when she didn’t show for work. So I tracked them down. Wasn’t that hard. I killed three of them straight off. Questioned the fourth to find out what happened. He was pissed they’d only gotten ten dollars from Eliza. So I killed him too. And it was then I just--let go of anything but that. They died because I was a no-good bastard who made my choice, and it wasn't them. I murdered those men. No hiding from it after that. Felt like it was time I grew up and accepted who and what I was and stopped trying to pretend like I could be anything better than that.”

He’d had a child, and chose the gang over him, and something in that anger tightened even more. If she’d had a child, she’d have done anything for them. He’d left Eliza in a lousy situation too, giving her the armor of respectability, but it was a thin enough veneer. At the end of the day, he’d put his loyalty to his gang first, and as a woman, knowing how easily the world hobbled women and let the men around them dictate the shape of their lives, she found that hard to forgive. Maybe he’d been far more respectful than most in not walking away, and letting her name her terms, but he could have done better, should have done better. 

But looking over at him, seeing the hunch of his shoulders, hearing the too-even controlled tone of his voice, something in that got through to her. It would have been easy to want to yell at him and hate him for it, if only he’d shrugged it all off. But he wasn’t a careless young man, barely more than a boy, who’d drunk too much and fathered a son and then done only partly right by them. He was thirty-six now, older and wiser and much sadder, and there was no need for her to hold him to account for it. He already blamed himself. He already clearly had sworn to never forgive himself for any of it. He’d impaled himself on the thorn of it well and good, and left it there all these years, bleeding all the time. She couldn’t be angry with him when he’d already punished himself for it so thoroughly. After that, all she could muster then was sympathy. God, losing Jake was bad enough, but to have lost a child--that would have destroyed her. And he damn well hadn’t talked about it, kept it locked up inside. She suspected nobody but Hosea and Dutch and maybe Susan and Bessie had known, in all these years.

 _Now you finally make some sense,_ she thought, looking at him. This was that piece she’d been missing that somehow bound it all together. The way he’d resigned himself to that life, even as he clearly didn’t love it, because the gang was all he had left. How he’d given up on himself, denied himself any kind of love or kindness. She sat there, turning it all over in her mind, trying to think of what to say that could help unbind some of that slippery, blood-soaked knot he’d bound his heart up in ten years ago now. 

She wanted to move closer, but he felt like a spooked horse to her right now. Approach too quickly, and he’d run. “So that’s why you said you thought me going to Hanging Dog wouldn’t help. You’d been there. With the folk that killed Eliza and Isaac. You knew revenge don’t help.”

He looked surprised that she would say that, as if he’d expected some kind of words of condemnation as the first thing she’d say, telling him that he was the miserable bastard he truly believed of himself. “It don’t fix the grief, Sadie. All you get is knowing the bastards won’t do it to anyone else, and that’s something, but it’s a pretty Goddamn cold satisfaction.” 

“Also why you was always so hard on John about Jack. I heard he left them for a year. Can’t have been easy to forgive him for that, John having what you’d lost and treating it like it was nothing to him. Did he know?”

“No. Maybe I should have been kinder about it. Time was when it was me that was twenty-six and still not quite doing right by a woman and her boy either. But Abigail and Jack was right there, in the gang. She’d have married him in an instant, if he only stepped up. He could have had everything, just like that,” he snapped his fingers, “if he only put in a little Goddamn effort. So I couldn’t forgive him for it.”

Now she pressed in, both physically and on the conversation, settling down beside him. He eyed her cautiously, but didn’t scoot away. “Yeah, you couldn’t, because you couldn’t forgive yourself.”

“What you mean by that?”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “I know you enough by now, Arthur Morgan.” The old name hung there between them, but it felt only right she use that one right now. “You’ll do anything for them as you love, but you can’t be kind to yourself. You got this _impossible_ ideal of what you gotta be. And you’re just an ordinary human like the rest of us, so you screw up, you make mistakes, and then you can’t never let them failures go. So I’d say you’re just about damned to hate yourself, over and over and over, until you learn some forgiveness for yourself. And trust me, it ain’t easy for me to watch a good man hellbound to hurt himself like that.” 

Now he showed something more than that guilt, and the spark of temper somehow felt better. “So what would you have me do? Say they didn’t matter at all? Say it was nothing of mine, what happened to them?” He got up to his feet, fishing pole left in the dirt of the embankment, obviously intending to go run off and protect his need to flay himself alive and feel bad about himself. Damned if she’d let him, so she got up too, stayed close to him. 

“How was it all yours? She could have been killed in that saloon where she worked. She could have married some other man and been killed. Say you’d married her, say you’d left the gang behind you. Who’s to say that they wouldn’t have come while you was on a cattle drive, or out hunting. Or even busted in while you and Eliza was asleep with no harm meant to nobody. Because I don’t care how big and bad an outlaw you was, I can tell you that when a bunch of armed men intent on murder surprise you and your husband in your sleep, there ain’t the _first fucking thing_ you can do about it!”

“What happened to you, that was…”

“Different? How? Because those bastards killed Eliza quickly? Why do you think I was still alive three days after them O’Driscolls broke in and killed Jake? It weren’t because they were feeling charitable. It was because they wanted to have some _fun_ with me before they killed me.”

Now he did look at her, and along with the blazing anger, she could see the sympathy, or pity, in his eyes. “I knew that, Sadie. I knew what them O’Driscolls do--did. Find a woman being kept prisoner by O’Driscolls in her cellar in the dead of winter, in only her shimmy, a woman who’s scared shitless and attacks a man on sight, ain’t hard to guess what they done to her. You didn’t have to try to hide it. At least not from me.”

The tired sorrow in his words hurt almost more than the anger would have. The women of the camp knew. Of course they knew. But she’d deluded herself that the men wouldn’t assume it, that they wouldn’t see her as something broken and tainted. Maybe a dumbass like Bill hadn’t put it together, but the smart ones like Arthur had known all along. Some part of her was glad they’d treated her no differently, that she hadn’t become _that ruined woman_ , but her immediate response was to lash out, because it touched on the pain and fury that still lived too close to her soul about all of that. “Like you didn’t try to hide it yourself?”

He froze, like a startled deer. Didn’t deny it, though. So she pressed on. “O’Driscolls kidnap you, you escape them, riding back to camp in just your underwear like they must have been keeping you? You said some things when you was feverish. Tried to say something to me about O'Driscolls and cellars, you knowing what it was like. You about took Swanson’s head off when he was trying to give you a morphine injection, yelling for him to not touch you. And when you was in Guarma, one of them O’Driscolls I caught said something--”

His voice went flat. “What did he say?” 

“You really want me to repeat it?”

“You wanted to go here, Sadie,” his words clipped and terse, “you really think me hearing some nasty words is worse than what got done?” She closed her eyes for a moment, hearing him admit it, even carefully. Some part of her had hoped it wasn’t true, even as she’d been virtually certain.

She sighed, admitting she’d neatly boxed herself in on this one. “He said it was cute that the Van Der Lindes were sending women out now, asked how ‘Dutch’s other bitch, Morgan’, was doing, and said Colm would find me a better filly to break than you. And I guess that’s the other reason why you went with me to Hanging Dog. You already knew the other reason I needed to kill Tommy O’Driscoll. Because you, Dutch, and Micah, you already killed the rest of them that night at the ranch. Also why you didn’t care about the rest of them after you saw Colm swing.”

“Yeah.” He said it softly, but he at least met her eyes, though she could see the awkwardness and shame in them that she knew all too well, because it lived in her too. But having spoken it made the burden a bit easier. “Did...anyone else know?”

Of course he worried about that. Bad enough when it happened to a woman, and it ruined her reputation. For a man, anyone knowing would be unbearable. “Looking back, I think Hosea suspected.”

“He must have not said anything to Dutch. I didn’t want him knowing. Crazy as he was going, he’d have made that into an excuse for an all-out damn war. Which was why Colm done that to me, why he done all of it in the first place. Wasn’t even about me. He just wanted to provoke Dutch.” 

“I don’t know how you kept yourself from killing Colm.” No, actually, she did. He thought little enough of vengeance, and little enough of himself that he wouldn’t get outraged on his own behalf enough to do something stupid and violent about it. She hated that in her fury she'd tried to provoke him in St. Denis, almost daring either of them to say what else O'Driscolls had done to them, make him admit that he cared more than he seemed. But Dutch was there, and besides, it wasn't something they could talk about openly, not then.

He managed a half-hearted smile at that. “Well, I don’t recommend it, but TB does wonders for putting things into perspective. We had much bigger problems than me wanting Colm dead. Can’t say it wasn’t satisfying to watch him swing, though. And to see him know at the last that it was me up on that rooftop, not his boy there to rescue him.”

“You probably somehow convinced yourself you deserved it anyway.” She noticed the lack of him denying it. She hated being right. “Arthur…” She stepped closer, put her hands on his arms, looked up at him. He didn’t back away. “You think I ain’t been through that? Worried that somehow, I asked for it by being alone up there in the middle of nowhere? But we didn’t ask for it. Some folks deserve a beating, maybe even some deserve killing. But nobody deserves having that done to them, never. And Jake didn’t deserve killing, and Eliza and Isaac didn’t either, and ain’t _nobody_ to blame for all it, except them as did it.” 

He was a big man, and for a moment, that nervousness was there at him being so close, but it was all right, she knew him, she trusted him. So she took one step closer, and wrapped her arms around him, carefully. He hesitated, as he usually did, and maybe that was what Colm did to him, the fear and the shame she understood all too well. But she suspected it had lived in him long before this past summer. That after what happened with Eliza, that impossibly ironbound sense of guilt and self-loathing kept him from believing he should be allowed anything nice or kind, even a little bit of softness like this. 

Because part of her hurt too, wanting so much to believe again that being touched didn’t have to be bound up in humiliation and terror, wanting to be comforted. “It’s all right.” She said it as much to herself as to him. “It ain’t wrong to want this, you know. We’re still alive. It’s good to remember that sometimes.” She felt his arms go around her in turn, at first hesitant, but then pulling her in tightly, almost too tightly, but that was all right.

She could feel that he was still too thin, but he’d filled out that shockingly emaciated frame a good bit, and his heartbeat against her was steady and strong. He was alive, and healing, and that gave her some hope for herself too. It felt good, so good, to feel that she wasn’t too broken to be comforted. But she hadn’t held another man since Jake, and this called up the memories, and the guilt. He must have felt something change in her, and sensed its cause. “It’s OK.” His voice went barely above a whisper. “You ain’t...this isn’t betraying Jake. Nothing like that between us.”

She managed a painful laugh, though more at he’d hit the mark so instinctively, and in realizing something herself. He’d played Mr. McCready for Eliza, and now here he was playing Mr. Griffith, and Mary Gillis had rejected him besides. She at least had memories of loving and being loved. _I ain’t even got that,_ he’d told her at Hanging Dog, and he was right. All he had was the knowledge that two women had judged him not good enough, and here he was playing house with a third. “No, but you’re a damn good friend. You ever meet some nice woman, I’ll be sure to sing your praises.”

“Don’t think that’s too likely. I’m a TB derelict getting a bit long in the tooth, no profession, no money, and an outlaw past besides. Not the makings of a great catch.”

“Oh, shut up. It never was you that Mary and Eliza didn’t want, you know that? They both saw a man they liked. It was the life you was living that scared them off. And you’re out of that life now, so...don’t count yourself out. Mary had you as some sorta-fiancé, and then you been a fake husband twice now. I’m thinking you deserve to get to be a real one someday.”

“Thanks,” he said, and she could hear the humor and gratitude in his voice, even if she couldn’t see his face, tucked together as tightly as they still were. It looked like neither of them was in a rush to let go, as long as it had been since there had been simple, ordinary comfort like this for either of them.

“I mean it, though. I know you enough. I know you gotta have loved Isaac. How bad it’s gotta hurt that you couldn’t protect him. But anything could have happened to him. Eliza--” How to put this and not hurt him more than he’d already been hurt? “You and her made a mistake, yeah. She loved Isaac, wanted to give him a life away from outlaw stuff, even if it made things harder on her. But you say you dropped by only sometimes. So it was her life, the one she chose. You don't help yourself none tearing yourself apart for things you couldn’t help, and you don't give Eliza no credit either by trying to make her life, and her dying, all about the things you done. You gave her respect enough to let her make her own choice with that boy, and live her own life. Her dying shouldn’t change that.”

“I know. But I can’t help but think I should have seen it then. I didn’t argue much with her about that. Talking all that big talk of Dutch’s about how we was living this brave and free life. If I didn’t want my boy living the life I had, then what the hell was so great about it?”

“You go down that road, you ain’t never getting out. And you must have been a good father that she kept letting you come back. She knew her own mind, sounds like. She wouldn't have let you around him if you wasn't.” She'd beat him with pure logic, if she had to, because that felt like the only thing that might get through to him. "They took something from you. You know I understand that if anyone does. You can mourn that, but don't hate yourself for things that wasn't on you. I been through that too."

“There's sense in that. Can’t change what’s past. Guess all there is now is trying to learn from it.” Finally, he let her go, and she could feel the reluctance in it with how his arms stayed around her, loosening until the very last moment, as if to get every single bit of touch he could out of it. He stepped back, put a hand back on her shoulder, and looked her in the eyes. She couldn’t say he looked exactly happy in that moment, but he looked thoughtful, calmer. “Thank you.” Those words came with the solemnity of some kind of vow. Then he let go. 

She reached out, put her own hand on his shoulder in passing as he turned to grab the fishing poles. “If you need to be alone some on the 22nd, you let me know.”

He nodded at that, and she grabbed the bag of fish, climbing the bank towards the horses. They rode back to Las Hermanas talking mostly of little things, the air quieter and more serious than it usually was between them, but somehow, it didn’t feel uncomfortable.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
Went fishing with Sadie today. Hosea always said it cleared his mind but me, my mind always got crowded. There is too much time for thinking while you’re fishing, which is probably why I never much liked it before. Because I know most of my thoughts turn dark too easy.

We talked about Hosea and I thought about him a lot, about how I wish he was still here. How I wish I’d been able to learn the things he wanted to teach me a lot sooner. But I was too busy worrying about Dutch’s good opinion of me. Always busy trying to grab the brass ring and never seeing what I had. Maybe I'll never know how much with Dutch was genuine and how much was him getting what use of me he wanted.

I told Sadie about Eliza and Isaac too, and Mary. As usual she has far more sense than me. I still can’t help but think about all of it, but she’s not wrong. I can’t change it. All I can do is learn from it and be better. 

Isaac would be fourteen this year. If I’d convinced Eliza to join the gang, he could have ended up like Calderón’s Manuel, a boy killed in trying too hard to be a man as it all burned to the ground. She made the right choice, and Sadie ain’t wrong that it was hers to make. He would have had a much better life than I did at fourteen. He wouldn’t have had to fight so hard for his goodness. I only wish he’d gotten the chance.

I think that I have always needed to feel needed so I could have some worth, and so I mistook that for love. It feels like I have always loved wrongly. Loved too much and too long those who always demanded things, and that meant I loved too little them as I should have loved best of all because they never asked much of me. There’s something to think about next time I fish, I suppose.

( **Sketches of young Hosea and Bessie playing dominoes, and Eliza and Isaac on the porch of their cabin, captioned with their names** )

 **Sadie’s Journal**  
It’s been almost a year now. Sometimes it still hurts as fresh as the moment they shot Jake. Sometimes I can almost glimpse a future where it don’t hurt anymore.

I want that and it scares me, all at once. I’ve had to scrape myself together already into something new, somebody without him. But that was about surviving, and being able to not give in to that longing to turn a gun on myself. This is about living, and choosing who I am without him. Letting go of all those hopes and dreams is no easy thing, long as we waited for them. I’ll never grow old with him. I’ll never hold a child of ours. But that will rot to bitterness inside of me if I let it. 

I don’t want to forget him. I don’t want to lose him like that. But much as I chewed Arthur’s ear about him not hurting himself like he done, I need to not be a hypocrite about all that. I can’t keep hurting myself like this either. You wouldn’t want that for me, Jake, but damned if I can see what to do. I loved you, love you still, it ain’t like I can just stop, ~~any more than I can stop breathing~~. People here at Las Hermanas might stop breathing all right, but the love, that goes on. Some things is just stronger than death. 

I can’t hold on to you, Jake, but I can’t let you go neither. Not just yet. So every memory I have of you is pain and joy all at once still. I don’t rightly know how to make it otherwise, and that’s the thing that vexes me. I suspect it will for a long time yet. But yet I think that's what gives me the strength to try.


	11. Las Hermanas: All Through The Night

He’d endured this over twenty times now in almost a year. Getting a loving embrace from _El Cactus_ was technically nothing new, although lying there on the cold metal table on his other side so Felipe could poke the needle into his chest to collapse the right lung this time--that was different. Good news being that months fighting to clean up the left lung had pretty much done it, but overworking the right lung meant that the few TB bacteria in there apparently had themselves a bit of a party. 

Nothing nearly so bad as it had been last year, but he’d started to feel some of the early symptoms again, the tiredness and the cough. No blood yet, thankfully. So in August he’d had to spend another two weeks frustrated and bored stuck in bed after the first right side procedure. “Still think we caught it in time?” Used enough to the pressure and squeeze in his chest, the sudden give in his lung as part of it collapsed in, to keep talking. Focusing on putting the words into Spanish helped take his mind off things to boot.

Weird feeling talking to a man hovering over and behind him, stabbing him with a giant needle and pumping him full of nitrogen gas, but he’d gotten used to that too. Although the left side of his chest already bore its share of scars from all those punctures--must look something like Swanson’s arm, a constellation of needle marks. The right side? It was getting there. “Think so,” Felipe answered, withdrawing the needle and putting a bit of bandaging over the wound. “Unlucky that it was in both lungs, but given how you looked when you got here, I suspected the right lung might show up eventually. Lucky that it’s so little, and we caught it so early.” He reached out, patted Arthur’s shoulder in reassurance. “Keep fighting.”

“Stubbornness is one thing I’ve got going for me,” he said wryly, sitting up with care, letting that bubble once again in his chest settle a bit before he reached for his undershirt and shirt. “Well, wish I could say it’s been fun, Felipe, but…anyway, _gracias. Nos vemos en dos semanas._ ”

Felipe just shook his head and chuckled. “Yes, until next time. But if all goes well, you and Mrs. Griffith might be free to leave here not too far into 1901. Have you thought about where you’ll settle, and all of that?”

“Haven’t,” he admitted, buttoning his shirt carefully, rolling up the sleeves. Almost into November and it was still in the 70s here in Perdido. He’d gotten used to it over the last year. “Don’t want to tempt fate too much, you know?”

“I understand that. And the fact you’ll need to stay near for further treatment does limit some possibilities. But--” He plunked down on a stool in front of Arthur. So this was going to be one of those serious talks. He gave a wry smile. “No crimes committed to put you here, but it’s not unlike being released from prison, I suppose.”

“Well, I wouldn’t know much about prison, but I’ll take your word for it.” The worst he’d done was a couple days in jail here and there, in the time before he likely would have been shot on sight by most bounty hunters. As for no crimes committed, that was laughable. Though he’d managed to uncouple the notion of that being tied to the TB and why he was here. He hadn’t gotten the disease because he deserved it. Plenty of folks here deserved nothing of the kind. 

“I meant that you’ve been living a fairly institutionalized life. A very clear place, clear structure, clear rules. It sounds like your life before that was a bit more free-wheeling. And you should have a fairly normal life soon, but you know I’d like you to stay nearby in Mexico for a few more years besides to continue your pneumothorax treatments and make sure I don’t see you back here in a few years. I know that’s...a lot.”

The notion of that was so damn big, like trying to encompass the ocean. Deep in his heart he knew he’d been shoving that off, over and over, in part because hoping to get out of here and making the big plans felt like tempting fate, but also because it was so much. Thirty-seven years old, and he’d never had his own life, not really. He’d been a kid at his father’s tender mercies, then he’d been scrapping and scrounging just to survive in San Francisco, then he’d followed Dutch and Hosea’s path wherever it had led, and then it was all about getting here to Las Hermanas and doing what he had to in order to recover. 

He’d chosen his path as a man by this point, answered the big question about how he would live, but now the mundane question of how to survive hung right there waiting for an answer. Putting the thing off didn’t help. Much like a dogged debt collector--and he knew a thing or three about that, didn’t he--the bill always came due. “We’ll have to figure it out, Sadie and me.” They’d have to, starting with the question of whether their paths even stuck together after he got his release. If she wanted to go her own way after sticking it out here for a year, he couldn’t blame her.

“There are always rooms in Chuparosa, or there’s a place nearby I heard about that you could rent. It’s small, but…”

“Ain’t like she and I need much space.”

“Well, it’d be big enough for you two and a couple of children, anyway, given you’d be able to start a family then. Might be almost big enough for that spoiled cat of yours.” He was glad for the joke about Dido, because then he didn’t have to answer the remark about kids. “You know the sisters and I will help how we can,” Felipe said, putting a hand on his shoulder in reassurance. 

“I know.” He was grateful for that. Heading upstairs, he dropped onto his bed, tired and aching, lying on his left side to keep pressure off the right. Reached for a book, but the spoiled cat herself hopped off Sadie’s pillow, waltzed over to his bed, jumped on up, and settled herself against him. “Yeah, all right, Your Majesty.” The reassuring rumble of her purr felt good. She might be demanding and bossy and cheerfully confident in expecting her due, but she always seemed to know when he’d had a rough day, especially with _El Cactus_ , and curled up with him a while. Never used those big paws to knead him either when he hurt like hell. She must have known. “Thanks, girl.”

He’d dozed off, because when he woke to someone saying his name, they’d gone from bright sunlight right into the grey-purple hue of fallen dusk coming through the window. Glancing up, he saw it was Calderón. “I’m up. What’s the trouble?”

“Marion Davies.” That was all she had to say for him to know. He and Sadie had asked her to let them know when Marion was at the end. Took her five months, longer than anyone expected, but she was tenacious to the last. “I found Sadie already.” 

He sighed, carefully putting Dido aside towards his pillow, and sitting up. “Tonight, you say?” Calderón nodded. Rubbing his eyes for a moment, he nodded in return. “All right then.”

“Will you be all right, Arthur?”

The pain in his chest still gnawed at him, but he could manage that. He’d managed far worse pain back at Beaver Hollow, pushed himself to far more strenuous tasks than going to sit with an old woman in her dying hours. “Better than her, I expect. I’ll be fine, anyway.” He looked up at Calderón. “Even if I wasn’t, she ain’t dying alone.” After his own experience on Bluestone Ridge, that fate was one he would wish only on the very worst of people. 

Getting to his feet, he followed her out the door and down the stairs towards Marion’s ground room floor. “She wouldn’t anyway. The patients here are our charge, yes, but we _do_ come to love them as people.” The reminder was gentle enough, but yes, he’d forgotten that.

“I know that. And I know you’re bending the rules enough already, letting us say goodbye.” The whole idea that TB patients needed to not see a TB death had its sense, but God, he’d seen enough death in his life, faced it enough squarely, that the notion of his own death wasn’t one that could haunt him much anymore. It would catch up with him one day, sure as anything. He only hoped he could keep death waiting a while now. 

“You’re the closest to family she has. I figure she’s owed that comfort, as are you, and you’re strong enough to bear this.” 

“I ain’t afraid of dying, Calderón.”

She gave him a slight smile. “I know. I’d say you’re not afraid of living either at this point.” He took that for the compliment she clearly meant. 

They’d given her a small room right near the courtyard so she wouldn’t have far to go. Though it had been over a month since she’d been able to walk there under her own power, and at least two weeks now since he’d helped carry her out there to sit in the sun for a few hours. She’d clung on hard, but the drop-off towards the abyss, when it came, arrived as swiftly as it had for him. 

Eyeing Marion, he had to agree with Calderón. She was so still, eyes barely cracking open at the sound of the door. Her chest barely rose and fell. But she managed a tiny smile, and her words were little more than a whisper, but she spoke all the same. “Brought me company for the last, have you, _Madre_? How kind of you.” Calderón had become the new Mother Superior of the convent only last month when old Mother Miguela died. 

He sat down beside the bed in that chair where he’d read to her these last few weeks. Reading to her from those books printed in Welsh, knowing the comfort she had in hearing the language as she slipped away, and sensing the pride she had that he could speak it again so well, and now even read it. A teacher to the last, she was. 

Sadie reached out and put a hand on his arm for a moment as he sat next to her, a slight reassurance given and taken. He didn’t know what conversations might have passed between Marion and Sadie these past months, but he’d seen Sadie talking to her often enough, seen her with that brown leather journal of her own, jotting down songs back when Marion still had enough breath to sing, even if lowly and carefully.

He glanced back over his shoulder at Calderón, and saw her gesture to the door. He nodded at that. Yes, they’d come find her, or another of the nuns, once it was over so they could make the arrangements.

He’d seen sudden, shocking death more times than he could count now, of enemies and innocents and friends alike. Waiting it out like this was new, given the only experience of that he had was facing his own end a year ago now. Or unless waiting for his father to face the hangman counted, but he’d been busy scraping out a living rather than worrying too much about that. “Do you want either of us to read to you?” he asked her, the Welsh sitting easy enough on his tongue now.

Marion shook her head, just once, back and forth. “Sing to me.”

He racked his brains for the fragments of songs in Welsh that he could remember, wisps of faded memory from his mother so, so long ago. While he struggled with that, Sadie stepped in neat as anything, and surprised him by starting to sing, soft and low.

Her Welsh was far less polished, and she had to resort to a line or two in English and missed the pronunciation here and there, but given she’d only been learning it from Marion and him these few months, that was no surprise.

Her voice, though--he’d never heard Sadie sing. She’d never joined in the singing at camp that he’d heard. When he’d given that harmonica, made some stupid remark trying to encourage her to use it, and she’d shut that down hard by saying she wouldn’t, he’d had the sense that what love she had of music was something else she considered sacrificed by the O’Driscolls. Just another bit of something soft and lovely that she couldn’t rightly claim anymore, hard and sharp as she’d tried to make herself.

She’d started to come back to it with that song record in that journal of hers, and teaching the Trujillos to read music, and him too, these recent months. She’d fully taken that back right now with Marion, clearly enough, and he was glad of it. She had a good voice, low and husky much as her speaking was, but there was a sweetness to it that came from an obvious joy inside her from the music, much like he could remember the look on Javier’s face as he strummed his guitar, or Karen’s face as she sang. 

He could have listened to her for the sheer amazement and pleasure of it, but he wasn’t here for his own sake. The tune was familiar, so he hummed along as he could, and he saw Sadie glance his way for a moment at it, though it was only on a few lines that he could remember his mother singing some of the words to join in. “ _O mor siriol, gwena seren, ar hyd y nos...Rhown ein golau gwan i'n gilydd, ar hyd y nos._ ”

 _All through the night_. Seemed appropriate enough, given what he remembered, and what he could translate as Sadie sang, was about facing the dark of the night, and the dark of the end of life, confident that there would be brightness to come still after both. 

“Oh, that’s lovely, both of you.” That small smile was back on Marion’s exhausted face. “And you, Sadie, saying these months you were no singer fit for hearing!” The words came slowly, wracked with wheezes, but she stubbornly managed them all the same.

Sadie ducked her head slightly, accepting the gently teasing chastisement. “I wasn’t ready for all that again.”

“Lucky children you’ll have, for a lullaby such as that.”

He couldn’t seem to stand it. If they couldn’t be honest right now at the last, when could they? “We’re friends, Sadie and me. A man couldn’t ask for a better one, but we ain’t married. We was just pretending it so we could stick together. She lost her actual husband last year.” He said it as gently as he could.

For the second time that night, a woman surprised him. Marion managed a low, gurgling laugh through her failing lungs. “So your friend is passing for a wife, and my wife was passing for a friend. The things society forces on us.”

Unpicking that notion, he realized what she was saying, and perhaps Marion here too was tired of lies, wanting to be seen honestly, wanting to unburden herself. He shot Sadie a glance at that. “So that’s why you was never married? I guess...legally, I mean.” She’d called that woman her wife, so obviously they’d considered themselves married.

Something in her eased, and she looked relieved that he hadn’t started flinging hellfire and damnation at her. “Margaret and I said God saw us, even if the law wouldn’t.”

“I suspect God’s a lot more understanding than most folk here on earth.” If he’d learned anything here at Las Hermanas, he’d learned that much, particularly thanks to Calderón’s brand of faith. Dutch might have said that there was nothing but darkness and oblivion beyond death, that they were all just pitiful creatures struggling on a sea of magma for their own ends, but frankly, that was one more thing the man got wrong. It wasn’t all grim darkness and cutthroat survival. It didn’t have to be.

Sadie spoke up next, reaching out to put a hand on Marion’s shoulder. “Do we need to write her?”

“Oh, Maggie passed years ago.” That tired smile grew wider. “I’ll...see her again. Tonight.”

“That you shall.” He hadn’t thought about it much, to be honest. But whatever the preachers and politicians would say, she’d loved and been loved, and wasn’t that what mattered most? He’d seen far more of moral outrage and sin in the way a man could treat a woman--wife or daughter--than in this. He had the feeling that ring Marion still wore on her right hand had been a gift from her Margaret, years and years ago. Perhaps it was something she couldn’t admit to the nuns, and he wondered if Gladys and Alun had known either, or whether they’d assumed the two were just two spinsters living together. He couldn’t ask now, because there was no time, but did that matter? 

It didn’t take long after that. Those hard, shallow breaths grew even more labored, and then finally, stillness. He remembered how it had felt on that ridge, able to finally let go, stop struggling. After everything, that sudden rush of peace had been something truly beautiful. Her eyes were already closed, but he stood, stooping, to brush a farewell kiss against her cheek. “ _Hwyl fawr,_ Marion.” Sadie did the same.

They found Calderón in her room, recently moved into the Mother Superior’s quarters. Still small and austere, given her status as a nun, but a little more space. Answering the knock on the door, she looked at the two of them. “It’s over?” 

Sadie nodded at that. “It was peaceful enough.”

Calderón smiled at her. “You have such courage. I’m not surprised you could handle it.” That took him a second to figure out. But he thought he got it. Hard as it was for him to face TB patients dying, it had to be even worse for her in some ways. He’d be the one to die if it went that way. She’d likely be the one to see it happen. Because some part of him was almost certain that when they left, it would be together. Watching it happen had to be even harder, and especially after she’d found him barely alive on Bluestone Ridge, he suspected she’d imagined that sight all too vividly. Facing Marion’s dying had to be something she’d been afraid of in numerous ways.

He filed that thought away for later. They could talk about plenty of things with Calderón, true, but some things needed to stay between them. Stepping into Calderón’s room, he saw the table there, and the photograph. Stepped closer, and took a good look. He recognized Calderón herself--Beatriz as she’d been back then--young and fierce, a repeater comfortably held in her hands. The man, tall and broad, a look on his face that said he probably smiled broadly and frequently when he didn’t need to hold utterly still for a photograph, and the boy between them, maybe ten or eleven at the time. “Julio and Manuel?” he asked, gesturing to it.

Calderón nodded at that, picking it up and looking at their faces, and he could see the traces of softness and pain in her at it, even now. “Yes. I’m getting my _ofrenda_ ready.”

“Ramona said something about that before she got the OK to leave,” Sadie said. “That they’d be home in time to get theirs ready.” They’d waved the Trujillos goodbye two weeks ago, ready to head home to Guadalajara. Sadie had their address. If there wasn’t a third baby Trujillo to congratulate them on within the next year, he’d be damn surprised.

“Are you making one?” Calderón asked. “You two have your share of grief. It might help.”

“I know it’s for _Dia de Muertos_ , and that’s coming up, but I don’t know much about it, I’m afraid. Local folk don’t always want to talk customs with us _Americanos_. Guess they’ve got sense on that. Nine times out of ten at least, figure we’re visitors who don’t much care about this country except as a place to get well, and we’ll call it ‘savage superstition’ besides or whatever. Never mind we’re all living in a convent, and it’s Catholics caring for all our sorry asses.” 

Calderón laughed at that, carefully settling the picture again in its place. “Locals up here wouldn’t know as much about it anyway. It’s more in the south of Mexico. Something with both Catholicism and the old Aztec ways. The soul goes to heaven, yes, but we believe that on _Dia los Muertos_ the spirits of our loved ones can be invited back here to share that one night with us.”

“Sounds nice.” Sadie gave her a wry smile. “Now, my Uncle Robert, he was a staunch Lutheran, but there was enough Catholics around Tumbleweed to hear some of their notions. And I know some of my history. I’m pretty the Pope don’t approve that whole Aztec ways thing, given the way them _conquistadors_ was when they come on in.”

“Oh, he probably doesn’t. Though the smart ones here in Mexico know to wink at it. And it’s much easier to wink at a small private _ofrenda_ than a large celebration.” She gave a wink of her own, and that mischievous smile that made him once again see that there was some of Beatriz Lopez de Morales in her still. “When I was a girl in Jalisco, our whole village celebrated, and I thought it was beautiful. We let ourselves open the door on our grief. We ask our dead to join us again for that night, we take comfort in that echo of them that still lives in us, and we take joy in what love they brought to our lives. I don’t see a sin in that. I’m perhaps a bit more permissive than Mother Miguela was on that.” 

“Maybe you ain’t a bandit no more, but sure enough you’re a rebel still, Calderón,” he said with a laugh. “So what’s this all involve?”

“Pictures, if you have them, and things that they loved or would have loved. Candles. Marigolds--I do enjoy them anyway, but I did garden them here for a reason--to show the path. Food and drink to offer hospitality. Sister Ursula is from Hidalgo. I’m sure after all these years she’d be happy to make _pan de muertos_ again. You set that up as your _ofrenda_ , and then as night falls, you tell stories and memories of them.” 

“Can’t hurt,” Sadie answered her. He couldn’t disagree with that. So many dead, particularly last year, and the weight of that still sat inside him so heavily. So hard too sometimes to find a good place and time to talk about them, without it being awkward and painful. Opening the door to it, Calderón called it. Sadie was right. It couldn’t hurt to try.

“I’ll make sure Marion is cared for,” Calderón said softly. “I know she was dear to you.” She wouldn’t be buried here, at least. Gladys had apparently respected her sister’s wishes to go die quietly at Las Hermanas, but she’d wanted her buried in West Virginia. “I’ll let you know when she’s headed to Chuparosa. You’re welcome to go along to meet the train.”

“Thanks. She left us her books,” Sadie said. “If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Of course not. If you head to the kitchens, Ursula probably still has something left of dinner. At the least, get something. You,” she shot Arthur a stern glance, “particularly need to keep eating the way you’re pushing yourself now.”

“ _Sí, Madre_.” He couldn’t resist it, both as a title and as a joke. 

Sadie headed out, but Calderón stopped him. “A moment, if you would?”

“I’ll scratch up some dinner, meet you back at our room,” Sadie said.

Turning back at her, he asked, “What is it?”

“Felipe says you’ll be getting out soon.”

“Him and me already had this conversation. Sort of, anyhow. No, I don’t have the first damn clue what I’m doing. Actually, no, I do have the first damn clue, I ain’t going back to the old life. Beyond that?” He shrugged. “I…well, I ain’t fit for being a priest or a monk, and that’s about all I know. Sorry I ain’t following in your footsteps.”

She shook her head, giving that soft exasperated yet oddly affectionate laugh, the likes of which he used to hear from Hosea. “You need your own path. But I have faith you’ll figure it out. Both of you. You’ve come so far already.”

“So any reason you’re not including her in this conversation?”

“I wanted to give you this.” She reached out, holding something out to him between her fingertips. “It’s not much, but--well, I’m not sure how well it always stood with my vow of poverty anyway.”

He took it, looking at it. A ring, either white gold or platinum, with a stone green as summer grass. “This ain’t--”

She stepped back, folded her arms to make it clear she wouldn’t take it back. “I don’t need it to remember Julio. I’ve come to realize that, and I kept it so many years out of habit more than anything. You gave to those in need when I asked you in St. Denis. So take it. Please. You may have need of it yourself.”

He could have refused it, saying he didn’t need charity. But to be honest, maybe he did, and flinging a gesture like that in her face would be cruel anyway. “Thank you.” Though he’d resolve to keep the thing if he could, rather than need to sell it. Though at least he’d have something to sell now rather than obliging Sadie to maybe someday sell her own ring from Jake, like he’d claimed he’d done with his. He’d asked more than enough of her, and she’d had to give up more than enough of Jake. This kept the wolf from the door just that little bit more, and he ought to be grateful for that. “Don’t worry. Even when I leave, you ain’t seen the last of me. And I don’t mean only because Felipe’s going to keep making me cuddle up that damn apparatus of his.”

“Of course not.” Tucking the ring in his vest pocket, he bid her goodnight and headed for his and Sadie’s room again.

It was well into the evening now, so apparently Ursula had shut down dinner, but she’d found some bread and cheese and fruit, and a couple of bottles of beer, and that would do. He found her standing at the window, looking out into the distance. He’d been half afraid he’d find her looking at Jake’s picture, that wistful and wounded look on her face. 

She nodded towards the food on the table, heading for a chair, and he grabbed the other one. “At least it’s over for Marion. That’s a blessing.”

Now he felt like he could say it, even if he felt a bit like it was handling a crate of dynamite that could blow up on him if he rattled it just wrong. “Can’t have been easy, watching that. Can’t have been easy, watching me back at the Hollow. Don’t think I didn’t know you was trying to look out for me.” She eyed him, tearing a hunk off the loaf of bread, but didn’t deny it. “It was like that with me,” he told her. “The hurting, the struggle, it just finally stops. If it happens to me, know that...it’s peaceful, at the end.”

“Sure, peaceful after you got beaten half to death!” she answered back sharply. 

“See, I prefer to think of it as Micah being pathetic enough that he couldn’t even kill a dying man.”

She rolled her eyes and lobbed the bread at him, and he neatly caught it, tearing off a chunk for himself. “You’d have made short work of him before you got sick, true. But please tell me you ain’t planning on getting into a fistfight with Micah to prove a point.”

“If I get the chance, it’s a bullet between the eyes, and getting the thing done. But before that...you thought about what happens after this? Both Felipe and Calderón were talking about when I get out of here.”

“Well, we’re in Mexico for a few years, sounds like. Or I guess New Austin, if you’re willing to take a longer ride here every two weeks. Me, I’d say better to keep lying low here.”

 _We_ , she said, and he didn’t realize exactly how much he’d worried about that until right then, when the relief was almost agonizing in its scope. “You sure you don’t want to go your own way?”

“What, you ready to be done with me?” She stared at him, gaze almost a challenge as it often was.

“No. Just...if you wanted to be free of me…now’s the time.”

Her eyeroll was an extravagant one, fit for the stage. “If I wanted to be free of you, Arthur, I would have left you on Bluestone Ridge. You’re my friend. We make good partners. Makes more sense than going it alone. So Mr. and Mrs. Griffith a while longer, it seems.”

“Just about. But I mean, how we gonna make a living?”

“What was the plan before mango farming or whatever crap Dutch was talking?”

“Buy some land out west, settle down, start ranching.” How many years had they talked about it? Five at least? Passed on good land in California, Arizona, Wyoming, Oklahoma too. But something always happened, and Dutch’s restlessness would never let them truly settle.

“Well, going west is right out since we gotta stay local. Ranching? I know a thing or two about it, true.”

“You do at that.”

“But--don’t take this the wrong way. You ain’t up to ranching work. Not yet, anyway. That’s hard labor day in, day out, especially when it’s only the two of you.” 

“It’ll probably take me another year or so to get there.” He could acknowledge that as true enough. His strength and energy were good these days, but he still got tired more easily. “A rancher who can only put in maybe a week’s work before needing to rest up for two days ain’t much use. Besides, we sure as shit don’t have the money to buy a place.”

“We have some money.” Now that was a surprise. She gave him a sly grin. “That sack of cash you gave Tilly from the train robbery? Pooled that with my own share, we did. We gave half of all of it to Abigail and Jack, since we thought John was gone, but still, Tilly and me walked away with a decent bit. Spent a bit here and there, but I still got a lot of it. Something like two thousand dollars. Won’t get us through to being old geezers, but it’ll keep us going a couple years if we’re careful.” 

“Managing the household accounts like that? Aren’t you the dear little wife.”

“Well, considering my sweet fool of a husband don’t have any money sense,” she quipped, “ _someone_ had to do it.”

Much as he enjoyed the joke, it hit a painful knot of honesty all the same. “I suppose I don’t. Never had much to deal with money beyond buying supplies, bullets, all of that. I ain’t never been in a bank but to rob it, Sadie. Don’t know about buying land, or none of that.” He’d defer to her wisdom on this.

She paused in cutting up an orange, laying the fruit and the knife down on the table. Leaning her hand on her chin, she sighed. “I doubt it’s different here in Mexico. We don’t have enough to buy good land worth having.”

“So we figure something out over the next couple of years that don’t kill me by working me too hard every day, doesn’t get our faces on a bounty poster, but lets us earn enough to not only live, but hopefully save something besides. My Lord, we manage to solve all them problems, sky’s the limit. Might as well try to eliminate TB entirely next.”

“The best solution to all the problems would be if you was born rich, or me.”

He had to laugh at that, because she was right. “Or preferably both. But sad to say, them days of pulling in a few thousand in a day robbing a bank or a train are gone. I’m a poor man, Sadie. That ain’t likely to change anytime soon.”

“I know about being poor, and living a life with a poor man.” Now there was a grim set to her jaw, and something she didn’t want to say, but had to say anyway. “Time comes we’re more able to work the land, we could take a bank loan, I suppose. But I gotta say I ain’t in favor of it.”

“I sure as hell ain’t. You forget what I done for Strauss?” He shook his head, still fighting the sick feeling it spurred within him even now. “Same thing a bank done, just in miniature, and with more absurd rates. I been out to the places of decent, hardworking folk who got unlucky. And I come and I took everything they owned and said I didn’t give a damn that it left them destitute, the debt was all that mattered. Cost a couple of them their lives in the end.” Downes, who’d never recovered from being roughed up. Poor foolish Winton Holmes, killed by that cougar. Probably others in the past too. “I got no desire to be on the other end of that. If anything, banks care even less than I was pretending not to, cause they don’t have to look you in the eyes when they come to take it all away.”

She skewered the cheese with a neat flick of her wrist, slicing off a bit. “Jake and me fought so hard for years to save our folks’ land. Did nothing in the end. We got a pittance for both farms rather than lose them entirely to the debt. I don’t want to give a bank any ability ever again to take what’s mine.”

He couldn’t see a good solution to it in a hurry, and suspected that it would continue to vex him all the same. “All right. We’ll figure something out. Ain’t like they’re kicking me out into the wild tomorrow.” He reached for his journal. “Here. Worry about something better.” 

She kept eating while he sketched. He had to think hard about it, trying to recall the pictures hanging on the wall of her and Jake’s cabin. Lucky for him, and for her, that he’d been there woolgathering, looking around the place as more than a source of food and blankets and money. He’d looked at those pictures, wondering about the people owning the place. He’d always been like that--couldn’t much help it.

It took him a few minutes, but he handed her the book, letting her see the quick sketch of the fair-haired woman there. “Don’t you go flipping through the rest of that journal, now.”

“You never met my momma,” she said, eyeing him suspiciously over the top of the journal. “How you even manage to sketch her like this?”

“You had her picture on your wall up in Pinetree Gulch. Figured it was your momma or Jake’s, and her hair’s light enough she was likely yours. Guessing the man next to her was your daddy?”

“Yeah,” she said. “You remember them pictures that clear?” She shook her head. “This is real fine, Arthur.” She reached out and touched the picture, as if touching her mother’s face again. Grimaced as she realized she’d gotten pencil lead on her fingertips from the fresh drawing. “Sorry. I smeared it.”

“No matter. I can do it again. I got a few pictures for that memorial Calderón was talking about, and you got Jake’s, but I figure I can draw the rest.” 

“I got a few more songs from Marion to write down, and more from the gang besides, so if you want to draw...”

“You got that one you was singing?”

“Yeah. I can copy it for you, if you’d like.”

“Thanks. I only know those few lines, just about.” She nodded, heading over to her nightstand to grab her own journal. “Sadie?” She glanced back at him. “You sing real pretty. Sure, you know that. But--nice to hear you.”

She gave him a smile that felt like the warmth of the rising sun. “Thanks, Arthur.”

So there they sat by the light of the lantern, her scribbling away, frequently humming to herself to catch the notes of a tune properly before recording them, the occasional grumble of frustration at messing up a page. It made for an oddly charming background noise while he kept sketching, the pile slowly growing.

Bessie and Hosea first. True, he had Hosea’s picture back that studio in Abilene when Arthur was eighteen, but he’d rather not deal with Dutch’s presence in that picture right now anyway. If his former mentor was dead, he’d as soon not invite his spirit here anyway. Too much to deal with already with Dutch without asking for more. And Bessie, who’d been like a mother to him all those years. He had faith that if nothing else, Hosea had found her again. He’d wanted nothing more than to see her again, much like Marion had with her Maggie.

Jenny and Lenny, laughing at something together on the bluff overlooking Blackwater. Nineteen and seventeen and they’d never been able to be together in life, but he’d seen that pull between them, that wistful youthful hope and longing he remembered so well. Maybe things like black and white skin didn’t matter so much, if at all, in that place beyond this earth.

Sean, sitting by the fireside singing, the one time people genuinely didn’t want him to shut up. Susan sitting by herself at Horseshoe, enjoying a quiet moment away from trying to keep the chaos in order, maybe a small bit of breathing room where she could let the responsibilities and the bitterness of disappointment and the hard shell slide away and just be.

Eliza and Isaac, a moment on that last visit when he’d approached the cabin after making a run to town. Seeing them there, Isaac waving happily, Eliza smiling too. Breath catching for a moment because maybe it wasn’t some perfect family dream, he and Eliza would never be anything to each other like that, but God, Isaac was such a good kid, and he was theirs, and that made it worth it. Every time it seemed to get harder to ride away from them.

The list went on--poor Kieran who nobody except perhaps Mary-Beth had valued until it was far too late. Molly, who hadn’t even had a grave, only disgrace for being betrayed by a man not worth loving. Mac and Davey, Eagle Flies, Hamish, Marion now too. Maybe it wasn’t _Dia de Muertos_ yet, but he could see the sense in it now, in this way of allowing himself to remember. That door felt like it cracked open all the same, and he could feel them there, so vivid in his memories. Remembering them like this, the bright moments of their lives, took away some of the pain of recalling their deaths, because it felt like the dying was all he could picture for so long. 

_We ask our dead to join us again for that night, we take comfort in that echo of them that still lives in us, and we take joy in what love they brought to our lives._ Maybe this was a start to that, to properly saying goodbye to the pain while retaining the joy. Because God knew he’d been so quick to cling to the former as his supposed due, while shutting out the latter. There was another thing he ought to let go, come to think of it. He had a letter to write. He glanced up at Sadie, and gave her a smile. “Think I’d better give Lenny a drink on that _ofrenda_.” 

“More like fifteen from what I’m hearing how you boys tore up Smithfield’s that night.”

“It...might have been fifteen, just about. I really ain’t sure.”

“He’ll appreciate the one well enough.”

“Well, hope he likes tequila.” She laughed at that. He’d realized lately how much he enjoyed that sound, given he’d heard it more these past months. So there they went, long into the night, and Sadie fixed her memories of people in song, and he fixed his in pictures, and for all the dead they had between them, it felt the most peaceful it had for a long time.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Arthur to Mary**  
Dear Mary,  
I had told myself I should not write you as your last letter said that there could be nothing left between us. I don’t argue that point, but should this letter find you, and should you decide to read it, it feels as though there is something left to be said so as not to leave it all with nothing but a whole bunch of sorrow and worry that all we have done is leave each other bleeding pretty bad.

Don’t you regret that letter. It found me in a bad time and it gave me an even worse time for a while. But it said some things as needed saying and we both are better for it.

You was right about Dutch. It took me far too long to see that. But I can admit it after all this time. Something that I think was always in him finally won out to the point I couldn’t deny it no more. He cost too many lives, caused too much pain, all for some lunacy. So I have left all that behind me. There is no undoing much of what I have done so all I can do is try to balance it in the end. 

How long it could be that I have towards that notion, time will tell. A doctor told me back last October that I got tuberculosis. Got it out on a job for Dutch, which sounds about right that should be my reward for years of being up to no good. You may have read the newspapers last fall reporting me as dead. As you can see, not quite, and I hope you ain’t going to correct them on that assumption as you said often enough you wished only that I would leave all that behind and become the man I should be. 

I’m trying. I hope to get that chance. I had planned only to make a better exit than my bad existence. Turned out I nearly had my way on that. I did my best to get folks away from that life, save them as I could. Tried to help other people too. I aimed to make that enough. But a friend saved my life, and so far I am recovering albeit slowly. So here I am still and it seems there must be some purpose for me yet. I ain’t never been much of a man for faith. But the idea is growing on me more and more. 

I met some interesting folks since we last talked in St. Denis. A wise nun, a Civil War veteran, an old schoolteacher, and a dignified Indian chief in particular, which together all sounds like an act fit for that vaudeville stage, but they gave me some truths that I have always needed, and I was finally of a mind to hear them. Funny thing was when I started really looking, the world does have goodness in it. Good people in it. So for whatever time I have, I will be trying to do some good myself where I can.

Mary, loyalty is the problem with us. Always was. Not the lack of it, but excess. How else could it be with so many years gone and still there was this thing between us that came back awake so easy, but we was both loyal to family above everything. Made so many excuses, ignored so many sins, for them as we loved, because those ties were so strong they couldn’t allow for nothing else. 

I can only say what’s true. I owed Dutch and Hosea my life. You asked me once how I become a man who could act such a cynic, that it didn’t seem to suit me. I didn’t say because your family thought little enough of me already. Might as well have honesty now. I was living on the streets of San Francisco for a few years as a boy after my folks passed. Not a single one of all them upright people living their respectable lives in that city gave a damn whether I lived or died. Hardens you real quick, because if it don’t, you won’t survive. I ended up mean and pissed off and half-wild by the time Hosea and Dutch found me. 

They saved me. Taught me to read. Showed me kindness. I didn’t turn out all that good, but without them, I would have been much worse, or dead. I know they had reasons that wasn’t all charity, but they cared for me when nobody else had. So then everything I did, I did for them, as my family. You must understand that, much as you have fought and humbled yourself to protect Jamie and your daddy, even as I know some part of you questioned why you should when they were off doing some stupid thing. 

I think you see some things clearer too now. Me with Dutch, you with your daddy, neither of them are worth how faithfully we followed them. Guess we both have finally done some growing up and found that loyalty is a virtue when towards those who deserve it, and a vice when towards those who don’t. 

As to the ring, you was right on that too (twice in one letter, ain’t that a wonder!) So I did what you asked and I gave it to two young folks in love. All that we went through has made him see that she and their boy and a good life with them are all that matters. 

I think of us back then, two silly young things wishing for something that never quite was and couldn’t ever be. Both of us seeing in each other some escape from lives we didn’t much want. But we couldn’t admit that. Felt too disloyal even thinking it. So we never got free. Fourteen years gone and we went and done it all over again, chasing that dream of freedom but still too scared to seize it. I fear in the end we hurt each other all over again for all we still couldn’t be to each other. We have always wanted different things, you and me. Us running away wouldn’t have changed that. Our troubles would have followed us and found us. It was one hell of a fine dream. But we all got to wake from dreams in the end. 

You’ve sacrificed enough years and happiness and pride for a father who don’t cherish you like he should. I told you Jamie should live his life, not what your daddy chose for him, but you should do the same. I wish I had done it much sooner, but I chose my way in the end. The weight of that is a lot some days and yet it feels right. 

Give your loyalty to them who value it rightly, Mary. Find someone who loves you, fine and true, for all that you are. Be happy. Please be happy. Believe me that I wish that for you most of all.

Arthur


	12. Las Hermanas: May The Circle Be Unbroken I

She’d learned chess as a kid from Uncle Will, and as William Adler’s son, that meant Jake played much the same way. Careful planning, long-term strategy, trying to think four or five moves ahead, and sometimes if they had to sit and think about a move for two or three minutes, so be it. There was time. It made for interesting times up in Ambarino, given they knew each others’ strategies and tactics well enough. They’d often played to a stalemate. It seemed fitting enough, given she’d known Jake all her life, that so much between them was known and comfortable. But sometimes there was still a surprise.

She and Arthur had gotten a truly fine handmade chess set as sort of a mutual Christmas present to each other, given that Sarah’s father Paul was one hell of a woodworker, and it had given him something to do to occupy his time since he’d come to stay with his wife and daughter. It was only the afternoon of Christmas Eve, but like misbehaving kids, they’d broken out the set anyway and started to play. So she’d found already that when it came to chess, much as in many things, Arthur was a different situation from Jake. He played chess like some kind of a battlefield melee. _Blitz_ , Uncle Will would have called it. _Lightning._ Speed and pressure, obviously hoping to catch an opponent stumbling under the sheer drive of it. He took aggressive risks too. Sometimes it paid off, sometimes it blew up in his face. She could tell, watching him over a chessboard, exactly which of his adoptive fathers must taught him to play. “You learned to play from Dutch, didn’t you?”

Glancing up at her, he made a face, gently putting down his bishop and finishing his move. “It’s that obvious?”

She made her own move, carefully placing her queen. “See, I’m thinking must have been Dutch, because Hosea’s game would have been more patient. Cause here you are thinking you got me all bound up, but I got you in checkmate in two moves now.”

He stared at the board, and to his credit, when he slowed down and looked, he saw it quickly enough. “Shit.” He reached out and knocked the black king over with a flick of his finger. “Yeah, you got me there.” He gave one of those funny little smiles that she knew meant he was about to say something he’d only belatedly realized was somewhat painful truth. “And yeah, it was Dutch. Hosea would have minded his queen far better too.”

She knew what he meant there. She’d heard Hosea talking about his Bessie, seen how Dutch treated Molly and heard that she was only the latest in a long line. “Well, off the chessboard, I’d say you take after Hosea there.” She suspected it wasn’t only his seeming to deny himself anything to do with women and love--even if he had, she doubted he’d be the type to run through a string of women. “You always treated us women fair. Cared about us.” She grinned at him. “I can vouch you’ve got the makings of a pretty good husband.”

“Well, I know your standards of that ain’t low ones, so I’ll take that as high praise. So who did you learn from?” Of course he quickly changed the subject, but at least he didn’t refuse the compliment.

“My Uncle Will--Jake’s daddy. Me and Henry both. Caro--Caroline--she was the best of us, though. Henry, Jake and me couldn’t never beat her, and her the youngest. Annoyed the shit out of all of us.”

He set up the board for another game, holding his closed fists out. She reached out and tapped his right hand, and he turned it over, opening his hand to reveal the white king. “You don’t talk about her. Said she ran off with a fella, but beyond that--” He gave a slight shrug.

And then again,on some things, she’d come to know Arthur pretty well. She could recognize a fishing expedition when she saw one. “She’s out in eastern Oregon. Her and Harold was running supplies to the miners last I heard. Like I told you, we ain’t written for years.”

“What happened?” 

She felt Dido rubbing up against her leg, and reached down to stroke her back. Mulled it over for a long moment, and decided she might as well. He’d told her about his son. She’d told him about Jake. This was a much lesser pain than that, wasn’t it? “Henry died in ‘87. That was hard enough. Then Daddy died in ‘88. Right about the time Jake asked me to marry him. Caro and me kept bickering. Her saying I was too stuck to a farm that wasn’t never gonna be worth anything to live my own life. Me yelling right back at her that she didn’t give a shit about our family and everything Momma and Daddy worked so damn hard to hold. She met Harold, eloped with him in ‘90. We wrote some, and I wrote to tell her when Momma died. But when Jake and me sold the farms after that, I didn’t write her to let her know where to find me. I guess…” She sighed, trying to work through all of it in her head, and even ten years later, the pain and frustration and anger still lived within her, callused over as it might be. “I was ashamed. That I’d have to admit she was right in the end. The farms weren’t workable. I didn’t want to give her the satisfaction. And I was so damn angry. I’d waited all them years for Jake, and Caro, who run off without looking back, she had a husband with a good business, two kids.” Josh would be seven, and Tildy five, and maybe Caroline and Harold had more kids by now too. 

As usual, she found herself trying to not imagine what a son or daughter of Jake’s would look like, but the poison of that had mostly left her. The wondering would likely never entirely leave her, as long as she lived, even after she someday let Jake go. But it felt like it had slowly faded into something like a fine-spun wispy wedding veil, a thing carefully packed away to be taken out again now and again all wistfully and gently, rather than the dull and rusty knife it had been that tore her heart and soul to pieces.

He nodded, making his move, glancing up at her over the board with a look of quiet understanding. “You felt like you was the responsible one trying to keep the family dream together, and your little sister, the golden girl, got to tell doing the right thing to take off, and she still got everything you wanted.”

“Exactly.” It took her a second to see it too, startled by how easily he read the situation, but then she understood. “Guessing it was like that with you and John, after Jack was born?” It made too much sense now. John, with the woman and child to call his own, who’d abandoned them, run off from the gang. Arthur, staying behind loyally, resenting John’s good fortune. 

“Yeah. I was a bastard to him. He was an asshole to me. He’d been back only about seven, eight months when we was in Colter, so what you saw was about how it had been since then. Him still kicking at the traces, me kicking his ass about the whole thing. But I couldn’t admit it was as much about him having a woman and son to call his own, and being so damn careless with them, as him running off from the gang.” He let off a low sigh. “Maybe I should have told him about Isaac. At the end, at least. That I understood how it was. No point hiding things then, was there?”

“He knew you loved him. I saw him at Copperhead Landing that night. Him thinking you was dead--that you stayed behind and died for him, for Abigail, for Jack?” She could still easily remember that hollowed-out look in John’s eyes, the slump to his shoulders when Sadie asked if Arthur was dead. “He knew, Arthur.”

“I know. We was always brothers, even in the times we wasn’t kind. But I should have told him. That he damn well needed to do right by them still, but that I got too harsh. Should have said I couldn’t forgive him because I couldn’t stop blaming myself for my own sins, and since loyalty was the only virtue I figured I had, I become a right fanatic about it until I opened my eyes more. After you and me got him from Sisika, there was just never a good moment we could be alone, until the very end. And then there was no time for all that.”

“You miss him.”

“Course.” He gave a small, wistful smile. “Can’t help but wonder where they went. What they’re doing now. Settled somewhere quiet, I hope. No way to know, though, and not like I could write not knowing where they ended up. Suppose it’s better they’re clear of all the old nonsense anyway. I did tell him to not look back.” His gaze turned back to her, and she could see the intent focus on his eyes. “You, though. You ain’t twenty-two no more. Caro ain’t that girl who run off with a man, and left you behind. You got a sister, Sadie. You pushed her away by stubbornness, sure, but it don’t have to stay that way. Ain’t it about time you write, tell her what happened with Jake, and that you both was young and proud and foolish?”

Her first impulse was to tell him he’d made enough of a mess of his own personal business that she’d thank him to not meddle in hers. But that died down when she recognized it for the defensive wounded pride it was. He’d won that wisdom in suffering and pain and loss. Chances were he’d never know what happened to John, and he could only dream of the best while probably secretly fearing the worst. Maybe Caro sat even now in her own home, doing the same for her. She might never see Caroline face to face again, given the distance between Oregon and Nuevo Paraiso, but a letter--she could do that. “There’s sense in that. Although I’m gonna have one hell of a time trying to explain you and this whole situation, why I’m going by ‘Griffith’ again and all.”

“True. ‘My ne’er-do-well best friend, an outlaw, degenerate, and general reprobate who I sorta have to pretend is my husband, it’s a long story’ don’t flow too neatly from a pen.”

She rolled her eyes at him, but let it bide. “I can’t say everything, sure enough. Though she’d likely just be green with envy that I had a bigger adventure than her,” Sadie couldn’t resist joking. “She’d never imagine me running with outlaws. Hell, I wouldn’t have imagined it of me.”

“Being the boss lady of the operation to boot, don’t you forget.”

She stared down at the chess set, toying with one of the knights, running her fingertips over the carefully carved face of the horse. “She might still hate me.”

“She might. If she does, then at least you’ll know for sure.”

She would, but the anxiousness churned in her gut all the same. It was easier to have put Caroline out of mind as much as an estrangement that was done and over, bridges burned. True, she’d been responsible for that. To get her hopes up about keeping some small part of that past alive, given Jake was gone, and seeing them dashed--it felt like as much a risk, dancing on the knife’s edge, as Arthur’s chess playing. “I lied to Jake about it,” she confessed, putting the chess piece down. “When he asked me after our first winter, and there was no mail from Caro when we went to Strawberry. I told him I wrote her from Blackwater, and she never wrote us back.” Panicked and told him that so he would believe it was Caroline’s coldness, not Sadie’s cowardice, that had been the final word on their bond as sisters. That lie was a thing she could never fix now, not with Jake. “He loved her. Always encouraged me to forgive her and mend fences, but I never would. She was his sister too, he loved her from when we was all kids, and I took that from him in the end.”

Looking down at the table in cold misery as she was at that, she felt his hand on her shoulder first, and looked over to see him standing there, leaning in to touch her and bring her back to reality from where she’d got caught up in her own head. Lump in her throat, she got to her feet, letting herself have this, glad when he wrapped his arms around her, holding her close. She loved the feel of this, because the man gave some damn fine hugs, big and strong as he was. Making some low tuneless humming sound in his throat, soothing as it sounded, she held onto him too. “Jake loved you,” Arthur said, voice soft and steady. “Never met him, sure, but I know how you loved him, and I can’t imagine you as a woman who’d settle for any less than a man who loved you back every bit as fierce. So he’d have forgiven you, in the end. No, you can’t fix that with him. Not now. But ain’t you always telling me I need to forgive myself things?”

She managed a sort of watery chuckle at that. “You’re right. I shall try. No sense in me being a hypocrite.”

One last press of that warm, reassuring hug, and he let her go. “So you gonna write that letter?”

“I expect you won’t let it go until I do.”

He shot her a bit of a knowing grin. “You got that right. But hell, it’s Christmas, so that can wait for another day. Besides,” he gestured towards the late afternoon sun coming through the window, “it’s about time we got ready. You and me got a _fiesta_ to get to in Chuparosa.”

She turned to her trunk, rummaging in it, pushing aside shirts and trousers and chemises and the like. “What did Felipe say exactly?” He’d checked in with the doctor a couple of weeks ago about going to the Christmas party in Chuparosa, given Arthur was apparently so close to being able to walk out the gates and go live a normal life.

“What, don’t you trust me?” 

“Course. I’d just rather hear what exactly he said, that’s all. It’d make me feel better knowing where he thinks you’re at, all right?” 

“Well, you already know I’m fine for most things. He said have fun, don’t go crazy on the drinking.” She heard him digging through his own stuff on his side of the room. “He, ah, also said if we wanted to stay in town overnight…” He gave a discreet little cough. 

She wasn’t sure whether to laugh, groan, blush furiously, or all three. As was, best to simply spin it for humor, given the ridiculousness of the whole thing. “Oh, did he now? Guess we’d best do it and stay in town, or else they’re all gonna wonder.”

“Or else we just thank him for verifying my fitness for, ah 'marital intimacies',” and she couldn’t help but let out a snort of laughter at that sarcastic turn of phrase from him. “But say we’d maybe rather wait until I’m out of here, since we was married such a short time before I got sick and never had no place of our own. Celebrate my freedom, you know. We’re real romantic folk sometimes, you and me.” 

It made a reasonable enough argument when she ran through it in her mind. “Oh, ain’t _you_ a clever fella.”

“Ah, even a dumb squirrel finds a good acorn now and again.”

Much as she wanted to chew him out a bit for cutting himself down like that, she’d let it bide for now. She found the box in the bottom of the trunk. Esteban’s wife Gloria did some seamstress work, so she’d ordered this a while back, when the woman kept hinting that Sadie needed a nice dress. Tucked it away because there was no reason to wear it, but maybe now there was.

She hadn’t worn a nice dress since the day she married Jake, except for that time in St. Denis, and far as she was concerned, that had been every bit as much a costume as the police uniforms Arthur and Dutch had put on for that whole show. Never wore that wedding dress again either. _Waste of money,_ she’d grumbled. _Not like I’m gonna have any use for some fancy dress up in the mountains._

Jake had laughed and kissed her. _Just shut up and buy something real pretty and absolutely impractical that you’re never gonna wear again, darling. You and me waited long enough for this wedding. Let’s indulge a bit._

She’d gone impractical as hell, all right. White silk, a pure indulgence that she’d never be able to wear again, even had they been rich folk going to fancy parties. But the look in Jake’s eyes when he saw her in it on their wedding day, and then the look in his eyes later that night after he undid all those tiny buttons one by one with excruciating slowness and she shrugged that dress off, made it all worth it. 

No white silk this time. Never again, at that. But she couldn’t help but run her fingertips over the deep blue-green fabric, rich like peacock feathers, that Gloria had talked her into, feeling it as smooth and cool as water. One thing to say about Mexico for sure--the women enjoyed flamboyant color in their clothes, and she didn’t mind that. She’d had enough of discreet blue-grey and dun and tan and the like, hard wearing for sure, but sometimes a little chance to dream in vivid color was a thing a gal needed. 

Pulling the dress out from its box, she stood, draping the dress over the trunk. Unbuttoning her shirt, she said thoughtfully, “You know, maybe we held off cause I married you after you was already sick. Sure, we was sweet on each other, but your TB, that gave us both the spurs to hurry up and do something about it.”

She didn’t look over her shoulder at him, but it wasn’t like she actively avoided looking in his direction as she would have once. Sharing a room as they were, they’d finally gotten over all that when it came to dressing and undressing. Some barriers just naturally eroded over time. They were friends, things were easy and comfortable between them, and they were both adults anyway. Wasn’t like they didn’t both know what a man or woman looked like naked, let alone in their underwear, so no point acting like bashful children about little things like that. “Maybe you did.” She could hear the humor in his tone as the two of them spun that story, some fanciful version of things, this way they’d developed that made the charade into a slyly shared joke between friends. “Marrying me, taking a hell of a long journey to bring me here. A true angel of mercy, you was.” 

She couldn’t help but smile at that, slipping the dress over her head. “I’m sure it’ll be worth the wait. Besides, I’m sure I been noticing you feeling good enough to get a bit frisky. Kissing me all the time. You practically ripped some buttons off my shirt last week hurrying to get your hands on me.” 

“Ah, did I now? Don’t know my own strength sometimes.” 

“Sure. There’s plenty of fooling around that folk can do. Eight year engagement? You learn a few things.” Or a lot of things, at that. The old abandoned mansion near Tumbleweed had been their own particular haven for a few hours often enough. She suspected allowing themselves that kept them from getting stupid and risking getting her pregnant. 

He gave a snort of amusement. “I do know that, Sadie. I was nearly married, once.” Not nearly so close to it as he probably liked to think, given she expected that it had been a rash promise between two young things who never could have gotten within a mile of the altar given the situation they were in. But she wouldn’t say that, because that was all he had, and the last thing she wanted to do was hurt him by taking that from him. 

“Oh, so Little Miss Mary wasn’t all a prim good girl?” She’d never met the woman, but from what Karen had said, she sounded like the type where sugar wouldn’t melt in her mouth. Not the sort to be stealing off and kissing a man senseless behind the stables, having his hand up her skirt and his fingers inside her in the privacy of some hayloft, or unbuttoning his trousers in some corner of an abandoned house and looking up into his eyes while stroking his cock, enjoying the look on his face.

The fact he laughed felt like a good sign, rather than getting annoyed at her joking about Mary. “My Lord. She took up with me, what do you think? She acted proper, used to chew me out something fierce for making dirty jokes, but--there was a lot to her that wasn’t like that.”

“She only had to act that way. Jake was the same. Preacher’s boy and all. The things we got up to, I swear.”

“Well, lucky for you that Jake didn’t get a notion to turn Catholic. Imagine the poor priest listening to all them confessions for eight years.”

She couldn’t help but laugh at that herself, still doing up those buttons on the front of the dress. Gloria had tried to talk her into wearing a corset with it. She’d given that up back in Tumbleweed after her father died. Too much hard work to do on two farms to bother with all that. A simple cotton band over her chemise had done for her after that to keep her chest where it ought to be. “You got a point there.” 

Done with the buttons, she turned towards the trunk again, wanting to find her nice ankle boots. She reached down, smoothing out the skirts, admiring the vibrant scarlet trim against the blue-green. She’d never owned anything quite this fine except for that wedding dress, but Gloria had been kind and said she’d give Sadie a good price, citing that she needed practice in dressing someone besides the ladies of the haciendas. 

She’d put on the pants at Clemens Point, fought and shoved and argued for the respect of most of the gang’s menfolk. After that, putting a skirt on again would have felt like a defeat, like she’d accepted being relegated to washing dishes and mending socks. Not that there was anything wrong with that--she’d done her share of it--but she could do other things too.

So that was one more thing tucked away out of necessity, something soft and fine that felt like it had no place in this new world, dangerous and sharp and hard, that she ran in just then. But pulling it out again, putting on something like that that was a little impractical but fine and pretty, she felt good. Not the same giddy rush she’d felt on her wedding day in that foolish but lovely white silk, but this wasn’t the same as that. She wasn’t a bride today. She was a woman still, and a damn capable fighter, and there was no shame in admitting both sides of that for once. She’d locked up plenty of herself for too long, and as much as getting out of Las Hermanas for this _fiesta_ was an escape from the TB ward, it felt like a chance to seize some parts of her life again too. And finally she felt good enough to take that and make it hers. 

Besides, anyone wanted to give her shit about it, she was more than capable of showing them otherwise, skirts or no. The material was dark enough she wouldn’t have to worry about blood from breaking their nose with a well-placed punch, because silk was a bitch to clean. 

“You look real fine.” It took a moment for Arthur’s words to get through to her. She wondered how long she’d been standing there, lost in thought. She turned towards him, taking him in.

She hadn’t thought about it, but some part of her must have known, if she’d bothered to consider it, exactly what he would wear. She’d last seen that plum red coat with its black trim and silver buttons, those pants with their fine stripe, even that fancy watch fob hung off the boldly patterned vest, in that lodge up in Wapiti, hung up to dry after she and Charles had gotten him undressed and safely tucked beneath the bison robes. He must have packed them in his saddlebags, and then put them away here in Las Hermanas.

It was the finest stuff he had, after all. So of course he’d wear it now, and of course he’d dressed in those clothes to die. For a moment, she couldn’t help but remember kneeling beside him on Bluestone Ridge in the witching hour, dim light of a lantern making it hard to see if there was blood on those dark red and black clothes, heart aching. 

That night and that memory would always be with her, and perhaps the faintest shadow of that grief became a fear that hounded her and always would, like a coyote waiting for the kill. But it passed. She looked at him, really looked.

She saw him standing there, thirteen months later now, without that exhausted sag he’d had up in Roanoke Ridge. How he filled out those clothes again, just about, rather than seeing the obvious folds around his belt from a too-large shirt and trousers. He wasn’t wearing that old waxed canvas coat over it all, desperate for warmth, and she could only assume he’d planned they’d take that off him when they buried him in his finery. Eyes bright, not sunken and bloodshot as they’d been, the hollowness and fever-flush gone from his cheeks. He’d gotten a little color back under the hot Mexican desert sun, rather than that deathly paleness. Hair grown out a bit, beard neatly clipped short, rather than the short hair and clean shaven look he’d had. He’d kept that up, saying it made him look a bit different from his wanted poster anyway.

She looked, saw a fine-looking man, broad and solid, alive and well, dressed in his best to go to a party. It did her good to see it, settling something within her that perhaps she hadn’t even realized had been hurt. It made it easier to put aside that memory. Maybe it was the same for him. Maybe in dressing in those clothes for the first time since then, wearing them for something about living rather than dying, he’d taken back something for himself, and faced all that.

His brow furrowed, and he gave her a sheepish look and a half-shrug. “What, I look all right?”

Impossible man. Of course he’d assume she was staring and finding fault, anxious as anything that somehow he’d messed up. Not believing that he looked damn fine. She shook her head, stepping forward, instinctively reaching out and smoothing down the lapels of the jacket. Looked up, making sure he met her eyes before she said it, giving him a smile. “Yeah. You look real good, Arthur.”

That earned her one of those shy half-smiles he had. “Yeah, all right. Guess this looks better on me than the last time you seen it. Wouldn’t take much.”

“Considering the last time you saw me in a skirt was Colm’s hanging?”

“You did make for one fine St. Denis lady, for all that.”

“I told you I’d have dressed up like the Queen of Sheba if I had to for that.”

He laughed, leaning down to shut his trunk. “Now there’s an image. You all dressed up in veils and showing your belly and whatnot, dancing the hoochie-coochie.”

She’d only read about the supposedly scandalous belly-dancing Arabian women in the newspapers, given an act traveling after the World’s Fair in Chicago in 1893 wouldn’t make it anywhere near sleepy old Tumbleweed, or the farthest reaches of Ambarino, “Oh, you’ve seen that rumpus, have you?”

“They was in Denver back in ‘94. John talked me into it. But gotta admit, those gals do put on one hell of a show.” Cheeky bastard, and she found herself smiling at it. “Sure, they dance a hell of a lot better than I do.”

“We’ll just see about that.” After all, presumably there would be dancing tonight. She’d seen him dancing with Karen at Clemens Point one night when Dutch had the gramophone on. He made a decent account of himself at that.

“What, you wanna put _me_ in that getup and make me dance? Can’t say I see that doing too well towards us making a living. Though maybe folk will pay to make me put clothes on again.”

She shook her head at him, rolling her eyes. “Every bit helps. Maybe we should consider it.” Pulling her necklace from beneath her neckline, she settled it, visible.

“You always wore that tucked into your shirt after you put on pants.” Somehow she wasn’t surprised he’d noticed. “And you wasn’t wearing it that night at the ranch that I saw, and you wasn’t out of camp at all until we was by the lakeshore. So--someone gave it to you?”

“Figured if I was gonna be fighting, better to not have something folk could grab. And yeah, Karen gave it to me at Horseshoe.” She reached up, took the golden pendant between her fingertips, pulled it out enough to look at it, then let it go. “I don’t know where she got it. Something of hers, something she robbed from a lady’s drawer in a hotel, who knows. But she gave it to me to try and help cheer me up. She knew I had nothing of my own by then. Real kind of her, that was. So I kept it.”

“You two was close, I thought.”

“Mary-Beth and Tilly were sweet girls, but real young. Abigail and me were close, since she had to grow up so fast, but she had Jack to worry about. So yeah, me and Karen was friends. And you and Karen was close too, it seemed.”

He sighed, sitting down on the now-closed trunk. “We was, true. I always liked her. We found her in a dive bar in some nowhere town in Nevada, back in…’96, I guess. Dealing blackjack and pouring drinks and sometimes entertaining drunk fools on the side and robbing them senseless. She was always a live one. Mary-Beth and Tilly, you’re right. Young, and they could be hard, but they was gentle. Dreamers, both of them. Made folk want to protect that before they lost all of it. Karen--different with her. Foul-mouthed and funny as hell, ready to go handle a gun like nobody’s business out on a job, and she was like the little sister I could drink with and not worry about being a rough fool.”

“There was more to her than that, though.” She came and sat beside him. Made the lid of the trunk a bit crowded, the two of them pressed against each other, but they managed. “She had dreams as much as Tilly and Mary-Beth done. She just felt like she had to act like she didn’t. She was like you. Cared so much, even while she pretended she didn’t. Had a lot that was soft about her underneath all that tough as nails front.”

“I know.” He said it in barely more than a whisper. “Guess that’s why we got along, her and me. We knew that about each other. How we wanted to be different but we was stuck as the people we’d been playing. And seems like without having to say it, we swore to each other we’d never breathe a word of it to anyone.” He sighed, looking down at his hands. “I couldn’t save Sean.”

“That wasn’t your fault.”

“No, and I could have told her that was a bad match anyway. She...wanted to be wanted.”

“Don’t we all?” 

“I suppose. But when you think poor little of yourself, you’re apt to take up with anyone who shows you kindness. Sean was a good kid. But him and Karen--they’d have killed each other. Maybe I should have told her that. Maybe she wouldn’t have grieved him so.”

“She had problems before Sean died. Hitting the hooch hard even then.”

“Yeah, she was. After Blackwater, all that pressure we was under constantly, I think we a lot of us broke in our own ways. Dutch, well,” he waved a hand in a _you know_ gesture. “Hosea got some clarity about Dutch and all of it. Karen and me, the facade got to be too much. Starting to see all the cracks in what we was doing, the people we become. She wasn’t drinking so much before that.” 

“I couldn’t save her either. While you was away. I tried, but she screamed at me that if I was entitled to go out and murder folk for my grief, I could damn well leave her to drink hers away. I...couldn’t much argue that point. Even if I knew it wasn’t all about Sean. I just…” She could still remember Karen sitting there on that boulder, red-eyed, hair a mess, obviously drunk at 8 in the morning, but that rage and grief in her was something Sadie couldn’t deny. 

She shut her eyes. “I couldn’t get through to her, and I had so much to do already. I don’t know how you done it for as long as you did. We both know Dutch was useless for doing actual work, and Hosea really couldn’t, so it was you as was bearing all that weight for years. Caring for all those people. Worrying about them. Trying to keep spirits up.”

“It was a lot easier when times were good. You was trying to pull them out of the abyss during the worst time we had. The fact you managed that--you’re one hell of a woman, you know that?”

She leaned into him a little bit, acknowledgment of the compliment. “Thanks, Arthur. You’re one hell of a man yourself.” She inhaled slowly, trying to gather her thoughts back together again. “Wherever Karen is, I hope she’s OK.” Even as she knew the other woman probably wasn’t.

He stood, held a hand out to her. “Me too. But let’s go to Chuparosa, huh? Have a drink or two. Have a little fun. We deserve that, I’d say.”

She took his hand then, getting to her feet. “That sounds nice.” She made a face, indicating the dress. “Don’t think a gunbelt will go too well with this dress, though.”

“You might be surprised, sweetheart,” he said with a laugh. “I think you could manage that look.”

“Gloria will kill me.” She wasn’t sure she was entirely joking on that.

“Then buckle your guns to Bob’s saddle and call it good, and let’s go.” He reached for his own gunbelt, buckling it on. “No matter. We’ll only need them on the ride to and from Chuparosa anyway. We’ll have to check them in with Ortiz anyway, from what I hear. Tequila and guns sounds like a bad mix.”

“I’m gonna speculate they know that from experience.”

“No need to speculate. Felipe outright said it’s because he ended up having to deal with the mess.”

Imagining the long-suffering doctor patching up some drunk fool with a bullet wound, and his patient but annoyed sigh at it, she grabbed her own belt, keeping it slung over her arm, heading for the door. “Don’t get into too much trouble,” she warned Dido, currently lazily curled up on Sadie’s pillow.

In the stables, she saddled Bob. “Hell with it,” she muttered, buckling her gunbelt on. She’d take it off before Gloria could see her.

Arthur glanced over, as he led Buell out from his stall. “See, I was right. It’s a fine look on you.”

“He’s named for a general, ain’t he?” she asked, gesturing to the pale gold stallion.

“Yeah, the one who cost Hamish his leg at Shiloh, so he said.” He reached up and patted Buell on the nose. “This Buell’s a far better horse than that Buell was as a general, I gotta say. Even if he is proud and moody and ornery as hell. Seems to me he should have been named for McClellan.”

“Or maybe a king,” she teased him. “Like you, and like this one,” she patted Bob’s neck.

“I ain’t familiar with a King Bob.”

“He’s actually Robert the Bruce, thank you very much.” She’d named him for that, seeing the dignity and courage the gold dappled Turkoman had. Seeing Arthur’s slowly growing smile, she said defensively, “What? You’re the only one allowed fancy historical names for your horses? Like Zenobia?”

“No, just--you give him a name like Robert the Bruce and call him ' _Bob_ '.” She could hear him about two seconds from laughing.

“Like I didn’t hear you calling her ‘Zee’ so you wouldn’t have to explain,” she retorted.

“Having to explain who Empress Zenobia was to someone like Bill?”

“Or maybe you didn’t want to look pretentious, Mister ‘I’m as dumb as a box of rocks’, was that it?”

“Guilty, I suppose.” He kept that smile, though it took on a wry twist. “I called Boudicca ‘Dice’, at that. Javier kept asking me while I named my horse for gambling. I said it was because she was an Appaloosa and spotted like dice.”

“Could be worse. Jake and me made the mistake of naming the chickens up at the ranch. The rooster was Henry VIII because he was an arrogant and randy bastard. So the hens became with wives. The notion of grabbing Anne Boleyn or Katherine Howard to behead her for dinner got real awkward.”

“I suppose grabbing Anne of Cleves or Jane Seymour would have been damn peculiar too. So what did you do?”

“Gave up, collected eggs, went hunting, and the next spring, we got more chickens and didn’t name them.” She swung up into the saddle, settling her skirts as best as she could around her. 

He trotted Buell up close and flashed her a grin. “So you had your own untouchable royals and then the ordinary folk. Don’t that sound just like reality.”

“If it makes you feel better, a fox got Henry VIII, and we wasn’t too sorry for it.” She grinned back at him. “From the gate, race you to Los Ogros?” She wasn’t sure what a jumble of boulders had to do with ogres--maybe some local folk tale she hadn’t heard yet--but it made for a good navigation point all the same.

“You’re on.”

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Sadie to Caroline Rosen**  
Dear Caroline,  


I know it has been a few years since either of us wrote. Probably we let that bide because it seemed there was not much to say at the time. We was still mad at each other, that much was clear. When I wrote you last to let you know Momma had died, I was even more mad because after having had to wait so long to marry Jake, trying to save the farms as we was, I was in no forgiving mood that you had your life and your man and your babies when all I got at the time was a whole lot of frustration.

Things have happened since. Not two months after, Jake and me finally gave up and sold the land. We went, we got married, we moved to a little place up in western Ambarino. Chasing our own dreams like you was always saying. That didn’t last too long. We was doing OK on making the new place run and were near settled. But some outlaws come through in the spring of ‘99 and robbed us and killed Jake.

It’s no easy thing for me to talk about all of that even now. Especially not in writing it down after so long of us not talking. So I will keep it to this much. It was a hard year and a whole lot of things happened after that and a whole lot of things changed for me. I done some hard things to survive. Not selling myself, since I know that would be your first worry, but I ain’t the same as I was. I don’t see things quite the same. I can’t call that all a bad thing.

Among the folk who took me in that year, I met a man who has made me think about the way I have seen things. A good man, one of the best I have ever been proud to know and to call my friend. But also one so loyal to a bad man who was like a father to him, who took him in as an orphaned kid and helped raise him like we done for Jake. In the end he saw truth on that and did his best to help people caught up in the mess of it, though it cost him a hell of a lot. But in watching that nightmare happen it made me see some things that I have been too reluctant to admit until now. It’s been ten years though and we ain’t kids anymore so I am able to be both wiser and more humble than I could then.

Our folks wasn’t bad people like that, not at all. But they ended up with a bad decision in Tumbleweed and they clung to it. They was trapped by the debt but they wouldn’t admit it like that, like it was some kind of defeat. Stubborn Griffith pride, I suppose. They stuck to it and said this was their land and they would make it work come hell or high water. Especially with Jake inheriting his folks’ place, and Henry dying and so the farm looking to fall to you and me, all of it was set up to happen as it did. When you love someone so it is an easy thing to be blind to all their faults and insist that the loyalty itself is all that matters. You was right. Jake and me clung to that too hard. We was loyal to a patch of dirt we shouldn’t have been, a dream that wasn’t never gonna work, because to walk away felt like spitting on our folks’ hard work. But we all got to live our own lives in the end.

I blamed you leaving, called you a traitor to the family. All I can say is that I was angry that you could leave so easily and not look back. It seems you have made a good life of it, but I felt abandoned by you for a man you barely knew, left with all the weight of the responsibility. To answer something you said in your last letter, you called it wrong on one thing. Harold being a Jewish man ain’t got nothing to do with it and it never has. I disliked him for taking you from us, and so fast. I worried he was a man who took advantage of you, with you being young and so desperate to leave. That was all.

We was sisters. We are sisters still, so I hope. It was all one way or the other then and we each made our choice for what we believed loyalty should mean. We both got the Griffith pride but maybe there’s a chance now for us both to meet in the middle. I do miss you, Caro. I didn’t write you after that last letter because I didn’t want to give you the satisfaction of admitting that we’d given up on the farms, so I up and disappeared. That was a cowardly thing to do, and I am sorry for it. 

I hope you and Harold and the kids are well. If you want to write, you will find my address on this letter. As you see I’m going by Griffith again but that’s a story for another time.

All my love,  
Sadie


	13. Las Hermanas: May The Circle Be Unbroken II

“So, tell me, mister, how’s eating my dust taste?” Sadie teased as they headed into the Chuparosa gate, and he could see already from the light and noise that this was going to be one hell of a party.

“Laugh it up, girl, we both know I’d have had you dead to rights if not for that snake.” Buell had spooked, shied considerably, but at least not bucked. That was progress, given Arthur would have laid down good money to bet that the cantankerous horse would have done even a few months ago, but it looked like they’d become good enough friends for Buell’s nerve to hold when it really mattered. He still wouldn’t hold his breath that Buell wouldn’t try it when things were good, though. Fantastic horse, obvious why Hamish had loved him so, but that boy had a mischievous and contrary streak wide as the San Luis all the same.

She looked over at him, tossing her head with a proud grin. “Excuses, excuses. Anytime you want a rematch to prove the point, boy, you just let me know.” She guided Bob through the gate, and it seemed like every hitching post, or thing that could be made to fit the purpose, had a horse tied to it, and wagons and buggies abounded beside. Getting down from Bob, settling her skirts back down around her, she took a look at the town square and let out a low whistle. “Damn, I didn’t know it would be this big an occasion.”

He nodded at that, swinging down from Buell’s back. “Ain’t seen this many people together since--well, St. Denis. But Felipe said it would be some big to-do, people coming from all over for it. Punta Orgullo, Diez Coronas, even Americanos across the bridge from Rio Bravo.” The semi-sleepy desert town had transformed for the night into a bustling hive of activity, lanterns ablaze, but at least safely hung up in long strands so as not to be knocked over by someone who’d had a bit too much to drink. Some of the lanterns had tinted or painted glass, casting a rainbow of colors on the square. “I figured with all them folk here, gonna be as good a chance as any to start looking for some work.”

“Oh, you was figuring that?”

“Seems like there ain’t that much difference conceptually in working a saloon or party for tips about good jobs for the robbing, and doing it for legitimate business opportunities. Though I guess probably less of lowered voices and meetings in a dark alley.”

She eyed him, efficiently undoing the tie on her braid and combing it loose, letting the whole mess of her hair fall down over her back and shoulders in a cascade, and then nearly as swiftly, securing it up into some fancy swept-up style with what looked like some metal pins. He couldn’t help but watch it with some fascination. Little things like that surprised him till, things he hadn’t known women did like that. She let out a short laugh, shaking her head, and the hairstyle held. “You just don’t know how to relax and have a good time, do you?”

“You ain’t the first woman to say that,” he couldn’t resist the quip. “I’m afraid I make for poor little fun, Mrs. Griffith. Not sure why you married me, but a man’s not gonna question luck like that.” As usual, it felt like _married_ was their shorthand that encompassed all the things they’d found themselves in--how she’d come back to find him, saved him, got him here, stuck by him. The sheer enormity of that sometimes still caught him aback. Maybe she wasn’t his wife in the eyes of the law, or in whatever Biblical sense. But the things they’d been through together, done together, it felt more and more these days like they were closer than many married folks he’d seen.

Mary still hurt in some ways, and losing her all over again had hurt as much as it had when he wasn’t even twenty-two yet. They’d been many things, but never boring. It was all brightest highs or darkest depths with her, nothing in between. But at least this time he’d made his peace with it, and let the ghost of all those failed futures they’d dreamed of slip away. Eliza--all along, his feelings for her had been respect and concern and guilt tightly braided together until he couldn’t separate any of it. Sadie? That was something steady and true and fine the likes of which he’d never had, and the fear sometimes on waking in the night that he might lose that, lose her, because either she’d be killed or she’d finally be done with him. 

“Oh, stop,” she said, giving him a playful push on the shoulder. “I married you because you’re a good man. And don’t give me that. You’re plenty of fun. So yeah, let’s ask about jobs a bit, but just enjoy yourself a bit too. It’s been another tough year, and I want to see you happy. See you smile, for real.” Hand still on his shoulder, she gave him a reassuring pat. “Not one of them smiles you get because you know someone’s looking.”

That did something odd to him too, some bright and keen pleasure, much the same as when she’d looked at him back in their room. _You look real good, Arthur._ Beyond that first instinct to take it as her just having pity and being kind, he managed to get past that. She didn’t tell pretty lies like that. It must have caught her aback to see him in these clothes, given when and how he’d last worn them, but he’d decided to make that his own banner of defiance. _Thought I’d die, expected it, and here I am wearing my best once again, and I’m alive still._ Besides, it wasn’t like he had anything else really fit to wear to a get-together like this anyway, and maybe he didn’t look so bad in it. It fit well again. It felt good, if he were to be perfectly honest. “So have fun, try to smile, but not think about smiling. That an order from the missus?”

“You think?”

“Yes, ma’am.” He flipped her a quick two-fingered salute from his brow, then offered her his arm, and she slipped hers through it, resting her hand on his forearm as they walked. 

First stop, of course, was Victor Ortiz’s shop, where the gunsmith was doing brisk work checking in weapons. Arthur had the feeling that a few screw-ups were going to happen, and some hungover people tomorrow morning would be pissed off at getting back the wrong gun. As was, he and Sadie checked theirs in, and she grimaced, looking at her dress. “This thing ain’t got pockets, of _course_.” She sighed, and handed her wooden token over to him, and he slipped both of them into his vest pocket, giving her his arm again.

Walking into the square, he could only stare at the crowd there, and the dancing, with a sort of overwhelmed amazement. “My word. Folk here sure know how to throw a party.” Probably about every musician for fifty miles had showed up, guitars and fiddles and horns and whatever else, all crowded onto the flat-topped roof of the saloon overlooking the square.

The dancing too--he’d never fancied himself as that great a dancer, but he could get by at a country party, in America at least. Fancy shindig like the St. Denis’ mayor’s party? He sure as hell would have had to ask Hosea for more pointers, had they expected him to dance there. This dancing here was something else entirely too, lively and brisk and vibrant, the steps unfamiliar, men and women circling and stepping cross-wise, drawing apart and drawing near, the patterns sketched by it ones that he couldn’t see clearly quite yet. 

He saw Sadie’s eyes go wide too. “Thinking maybe we’d best find a drink and sit the dancing out a while. No point looking that much like damn fools.”

Hearing a chuckle at that behind them, he turned to see Felipe there, dressed in his best as well. “Good to see you made it, Arthur, Sadie. And the _jarabe_ can be a bit daunting if you’re not used to it, true.” He gave a wistful smile. “Luisa was a fine dancer.” It took the man a while to admit his history, but hearing he’d lost a wife eight years ago now, Arthur assumed he’d flung himself into his work and never come out of it. 

“Well,” Sadie said, reaching out and giving his arm a reassuring pat, “she’d think the world of what you’re doing for folk with TB.” She leaned in a little, giving him a slight smile. “But she’d probably also want you to find some fine woman and dance with her.”

Felipe laughed a sort of polite, shy laugh that said how startled he was at the idea. “Maybe.”

“Don’t make me send a woman after you,” Sadie warned. “Now, if you’ll excuse us, I made this husband of mine’s swear he’s gonna have some fun himself.”

Heading towards the saloon, he shook his head. “How the hell do you manage to charmingly threaten someone?”

“It’s easier when you ain’t a big fella,” she teased him.

“People do expect the intimidation from me,” he answered dryly. “I noticed, sure.” Dutch had sure as hell made good use of that innate talent. Having his first street brat project grow up to be tall and broad, effortlessly putting the fear of a pummeling into someone just by showing up, had worked out really well for him.

“Yeah, and I notice you go out of your way to put folk at ease. You’re polite. You tell them they got no reason to be scared if you see they’re nervous.”

“Do I?”

Her voice softened as they threaded their way through the crowd towards the bar. “You don’t gotta play dumb with me, you know that?”

There she went again, pulling that odd trick of somehow pulling the rug out from under him and yet at the same time catching him and holding him steady. “I--old habits cling hard.” 

Paying for two tequilas to start the night, and two bottles of beer to nurse a while after that, he reached for the shot, and held it up. “Well then. Your toast.”

She nodded at that, looking thoughtful for a moment, then held up her own glass. “We changed a lot already, you and me, for the better. And lots of things is gonna be changing soon. So: better times and better habits.”

“Better times and better habits,” he echoed. She clicked her glass against his, and both of them touched their glasses down to the bar, then threw back the shot. The fierce burn of it hit him, but it felt good. 

Felt good too to be walking around Chuparosa without the mask on for the first time, to not feel that faint caution from folks at him being identified as one of the Las Hermanas patients getting out for his health and sanity. True, he was in the minority here anyway, but there were enough Americanos, or white Mexicans, hanging around that he wasn’t entirely remarkable. To just be another ordinary man, fading into the background, felt reassuring. 

Handing Sadie one of the bottles of beer, he kept an ear open for the conversation going on around them.

“Allende’s going to clean things up now that he’s been appointed governor, he’s one of us…”

“...so Goddamn sick of this piss they call tequila…”

“Sixty pesos for _that_ shit? That’s robbery!”

Before long, he heard what he was looking for. 

“...supposed to get the herd across the river, I ask you, with the likes of these lazy shits?” The man jerked a thumb around to the bar patrons. “Most of these fools can’t sit a horse, and if they could, they wouldn’t put in a solid days’ work if you held a gun to their head.”

“Gimme a minute,” he said to Sadie, leaving his beer on the bar with her, and heading over. “Couldn’t help but overhear, mister. You looking for hands for a drive north?” he asked, making sure he said it in Spanish, making sure that even American-accented as it was, he made it clear he belonged down here.

“Might be.” Shrewdly non-committal. He couldn’t help but be aware of being looked up and down, and assessed like a piece of livestock himself. 

“Cattle, horses, what?”

“Horses. Heading to MacFarlane’s Ranch in February.”

“I’m good with horses.”

“Good with a gun?”

“I’ve been known to hold my own.”

He gave a low chuckle. “ _Gringo_ , look. The only _Americanos_ who cross the San Luis are missionaries, businessmen, fools, and men running from either the law or their past. I don’t take you for a preacher or a tycoon, so either you’re chasing some romantic dream of _señoritas_ \--”

The casual contempt stirred the coals of his anger easily enough, too many reminders of being looked at and dismissed, told he wasn’t worth shit. So he kept his voice level with a little effort. Much as he’d like to tell him to go to hell, that was satisfaction he couldn’t afford just now, particularly when he didn’t know the playing field and how big a man this might be. “I got a wife already, _señor_. She’s a damn good rider herself. Grew up ranching. We’d work real hard, I swear.” 

He waved a hand dismissively. “I don’t take women on drives. And if you’re so tied to her apron strings she won’t let you get away from her for a week, then you’ve got bigger problems than whatever made you two decide to cross the border.”

So this was what it was like looking for honest work. He’d been insulated by the gang, true enough, and their rules were far different than the world’s. but even there, Sadie had needed to scrap and fight her way to respect. He should have figured shit like this would happen. 

It tugged too hard at memories he wanted so much to forget. He’d tried to be honest, once before. Watching his father hang, and he’d picked a few pockets there at the hanging to buy him a few weeks’ grace and so he wouldn’t have to watch for too long--God, he’d hated his father far more than whatever scraps of obligation and affection remained, but it was an awful death. He’d been so scared, and so glad to be free of his father, that he’d wanted any life at all but one that would end like that. 

He’d learned at eleven years old than being honest wasn’t easy as an orphaned brat without family, means, or education. He’d carried packages for a few rich ladies, earned a few coins, but not nearly enough. Even begging, terrified and awkward as he was at it, hadn’t gotten him anywhere. He’d learned a lesson there, all right. _The world don’t care that you want to be honest. It won’t let you be._ So he’d lasted a month, the money ran out, and it was winter besides. He’d picked a lady’s pocket and made ten times what he had putting up with shit to do errands. After that, he’d tried to not look back too much.

There was Dutch’s voice in his head telling him all over again how it was. _It ain’t your fault, son, it’s the world that’s rotten. And you know what you ought to say to that? To hell with them. Fight back and take what’s yours, what they’d deny you by saying you don’t deserve nothing._

Sure. He felt good enough these days he had no doubt he could savagely beat the hell out of the man, gain a moment’s satisfaction, and know he was nothing better than a Goddamn feral animal in doing it. If there was one thing he wasn’t going to do, it was prove Dutch Van Der Linde right in the end. “Well then, if these folk are too lazy and I’m too married, good luck finding the perfect fellas for the job. I’d say you got about as much chance there as lassoing a unicorn.” He’d let his smart mouth get the better of him, but better that than his fists. 

He pushed off the bar, heading back to Sadie, grabbing his beer and taking a hefty drink. “That went well, I assume.”

“Driving horses to MacFarlane’s in a few months, but he don’t much like Americans--figures either I’m an idiot or I got something to hide that I’m down here. Plus he don’t take women,” he said it bluntly. “Guess I could have told him that I’m in Mexico for the TB, but sure, that ain’t gonna improve his opinion.” He likely would have had some smartass remark about worrying that Arthur would up and die on the drive.

“No pleasing some folk,” Sadie said with a shrug, then leaning an elbow on the bar. “It’s gallant of you, Arthur, but that’s the world for women. Even you didn’t blink at me getting assigned kitchen duty first as a matter of course. So if you gotta take jobs without me, well, I kinda expected that.”

“Oh.” Admittedly, he hadn’t. Particularly not after how she’d proved herself with the gang, and how things ran at Las Hermanas. But he should have thought ahead and seen it. He sighed, leaning back against the bar himself, taking another drink. “I ain’t lived fully in that reality. Not then, not now. Where I been, it’s always been different.” 

“You‘re a man, honey,” she said, but her tone was kindly all the same, and she reached over and gave him a pat on the arm. “You ain’t gonna see it as readily.”

“That’s true, I suppose.” Now he couldn’t help but feel the anxious stirring of the fear that the world was too damn much for him, and that he knew far too little to survive in it, given the only rules he had learned in his life were crooked as a dog’s hind leg. “He’s just one fella, though. Can’t all be like that.”

Polishing off her beer, she left the bottle on the bar for the bartender, then grabbed his hand, pulling him towards the door. “That’s the spirit. Come dance with me. We’ll figure it out.”

Luck or God or whatever must have felt charitable after giving him that backhanded swat from the stock foreman, because he heard a familiar waltz-tempo tune as they made their way into the square. Like many things, though, even that kindness didn’t come without a few barbs, given the memories it tugged and brought to light again. Javier had played “Cielito Lindo” for them more than once, though he had known only the chorus then, not understanding Spanish. 

He’d played it that night in Shady Belle when he and John and Dutch brought Jack back, celebrating the boy’s safe return. Looking back now, that night felt like one last rally before it went completely to hell, but even then, among the singing and drinking, and the joy that Abigail and John could both barely contain, the cracks were there that would become full-blown canyons in Beaver Hollow. Molly and Dutch screaming at each other. Pearson and Bill fistfighting.

Glancing at Sadie, he saw the faraway look on her face too, seeing she obviously remembered too. She’d been there, finally one of them, seeing the family that had taken her in start to collapse. She hadn’t had good and mellow years with them like he had, she’d come in when they were ragged and frantic after Blackwater and it never got better, still reeling from Jake and losing more people just as she’d come to love them, but she’d fought like a Goddamn lioness for them all the same. 

He reached out, caught her left hand in his right, stepping closer, lightly putting his right hand at her waist. “It ain’t wrong, wanting to shut it out for a bit.” He had to tell himself that, over and over, or else the pain would never end. “We don’t owe them everything. We’re here and we’re living, remember? So smile, Sadie girl, and let’s have us a dance.” He’d been a pretty damn good thief in his day, so fine, if he had to steal moments away from the ghosts and the memories, so be it. 

She did smile then, looking up at him, settling her hand at his shoulder. “Yeah, sounds good.” 

That felt like exactly what they needed, and he managed to forget himself enough, not worrying about clumsiness, overthinking the steps, that it turned out to be fun. Towards the end of the song, she laughed, told him, “You’ve been holding out on me.”

“How so?” He did another turn, twirling her under his arm one more time as the last notes faded. 

The next song sounded a lot brisker, so they headed out of the square, yielding to those with the inclination for it. He’d been right, because they started up again with those vibrant, energetic moves. She kept hold of his hand as they walked off, and he wasn’t inclined to let go. Couldn’t say for sure when exactly all those little touches of hers became less of a startling surprise to him, but he still savored them all the same. “Didn’t know you were this good at dancing. You learn that from Mary?”

“Sadly, it ain’t cause I was a charmer with the ladies. No, Susan and Bessie taught me when I was eighteen. And you saw Susan. I learned as fast as I could--best _never_ to disappoint that woman.” He’d meant to not bring them up, but strangely, mentioning Susan brought only the good stuff for now, remembering being eighteen, still growing into his body and feeling all gangly and clumsy, partnering with Bessie while Susan instructed and offered commentary.

Sadie gave a cheeky grin at that, hand tightening for a moment in his. “Bet she was a proper man-eater.”

“Much as we moved around, sure. She had her share of towns she left men with a smile.” Given how Dutch ran through women, they could hardly criticize Susan for her lovers. “Bessie used to joke that eventual wives in six or seven different states had Susan to thank for showing their men how to do more than sixty seconds of frantic humping like a dog on a leg.”

He could say that with her and not worry it was too crude and uncouth, and her guffaw confirmed it. “Bessie sounds like one hell of a woman.”

“She was.” Strangely enough, thinking of both Susan and Bessie, only the warmth was there tonight, not the cold ashes of grief. “Good bit like you, I’d say. Took no shit from anyone, but she was kind. That first night after Dutch and Hosea took me in, it was Bessie who told me where she and Hosea was going when they left me to sleep in their hotel room. So I wouldn’t wake and think they’d run off. She...somehow she knew I needed that. Though she come around to the life we was living, in the end. Turns out she could scam the paint off a wall, just about. First job she, Hosea, and me pulled together--’81, maybe? My God. I swear Hosea was so hot for her after it was done, he almost couldn’t wait for us to get back to the hotel.” He couldn’t help but laugh, remembering it. “We didn’t see neither of them down for dinner, of course.”

They’d tried to go straight for a while, from what Hosea said. There had been those few months in 1880 when they’d disappeared, and Dutch claimed Hosea was scouting ahead. He’d been so busy himself learning from Dutch, giddy with his mentor-father’s allowing him to learn to shoot finally, feeling so grown up, anxious to make a good impression with it. When Hosea and Bessie came back, they didn’t claim any different than that story. Probably ashamed to admit how quickly they’d run the course and come back. That was the point Bessie fully embraced the life. 

Had they quickly hit a wall of the frustration and given up with how hard it was to go on the straight and narrow without money or means already, or had it been genuinely finding a lack of opportunity and turning back to their only certainty? He wouldn’t ever know for sure.

Walking away from the crowd and the noise a bit, needing something quieter, he tried to frame those thoughts as they passed behind the general store, following the line of the adobe town wall. A darker night tonight, the waning moon hanging overhead, casting deeper shadows on the edges of Chuparosa, away from the blazing lights of the party.

“Penny for your thoughts, Mr. Griffith?”

“Oh, I ain’t sure it’s worth that much.” She shot him a pointed glower. “Sadie, nothing on my mind. Not really. Just--happy to be here.” _Here_ as in Chuparosa tonight with her, and as in still alive, still existing, still given a chance to be better and make something of himself, hard as that would be. “We’ll figure it out.”

She would have replied then, but just then, he caught sight of someone hurrying off over near the bank. Shook his head. “Maybe we’d best clear out before we bump into young folk sneaking off hoping for some more, ah, private festivities,” he joked.

“Lord, I remember them days.” She shook her head and laughed lowly.

“Yeah, me too.” A crowded party like this was a Godsend to young lovers, and no mistake Mary had been clever enough to realize it, given she’d dragged him to every damn shindig within an hour’s ride, they danced once or twice, and then sneaked off to find some private corner somewhere. Nothing that could risk getting her pregnant, because without even an actual formally announced engagement, he respected that demand of hers without question. She had so much more to lose, and he would wait. Besides, he’d been enough of a young fool to dream about their wedding night then being something truly wonderful for the wait. He’d been with a couple of women before that, Dutch paying his way and urging him with a laugh to go “make a man” of himself. But that had been only a few minutes that felt pretty good, and nothing that touched anything in him that mattered. Hardly worth the fuss most men made about it, in his opinion, and so awkward besides in sensing just how ridiculous and desperate men must look to women who made their living that way. The way he felt when he was with Mary, touching her, discovering what made her shiver and gasp--that had been something different, something special, more like the way he could tell it should be. “Mary and me probably spent as much time hiding in a hayloft than anything. We was in love, I don't doubt that, but guess she was scared for us to be seen out together, and have to explain things to folk, who I was and all. Should have told us something.”

She sighed, leaning back against the wall of the store. “I do want to hate her, but I can’t say I don’t see her side, given you was an outlaw and not gonna give that up, and that was a hell of a risk for a woman. Eliza too, at that. It was the outlaw they didn’t want, you know. They liked the man.”

Even now, it felt hard to separate the two, as much as Sadie kept insisting on the distinction. “Rare enough that a woman wants to live that life, true.”

Though when he looked at the shadow now carefully sneaking along, seeing her face for a brief instant in the light of a lantern on the wall, he couldn’t help but stare. He’d never seen her in anything but the severe habit and wimple, but here she was, hair done in a neat coil, and dressed in a lace-trimmed white blouse and a skirt as blue as sapphires. “Juanita?”

She turned, startled, and saw the two of them. Said a curse that, thanks to her and Pedro’s tutelage, he understood, though he never thought he’d hear it from a nun. From the look of her, bright eyes and reddened lips, she’d been kissing someone, and being kissed, pretty damn thoroughly. 

Thinking of Pedro, suddenly things snapped into place, and a suspicion crystallized. Had they been anyone else, he’d have joked about it long since, but she was a _nun_ , so he’d written it off as a figment of his imagination. Pedro had left Las Hermanas six months ago, but he’d found work around Chuparosa--he’d planned to ask the man about that when he saw him. Stayed around for more pneumothorax treatments, true, but it seemed he had something else to stay for. “You and Pedro?” She nodded. “Does Calderón know you’re here?” He wouldn’t be surprised if the gently meddling Mother Superior had practically shoved her to the party with the man she loved.

“No.” He gave Juanita high marks for guts in sneaking out totally, in that case. She ducked her head, a move that he recognized that would help hide her face in the nun’s garb, but didn’t do much in this case. “She’s so much kinder than Miguela was, but…”

Sadie let out a low sigh, patting a stack of crates. “Sit down, then. You wanna talk about it? We’re heretic Protestants if we’re anything, Arthur and me, so we’re not gonna take it as an affront to the Church.”

Juanita let out a watery laugh at that, though she moved over and sat down gingerly. “Very well, then.” He figured he’d let Sadie take the lead on this one, woman-to-woman.

“All right, I’m gonna admit to ignorance. Can folk even leave being a nun?” 

“I could petition to be released from my vows, yes.”

“So you want that? You want to be with Pedro? It ain’t the TB or anything else making you hesitate?”

“No! Working with the patients, if anything, I see that time with those we love is precious. And I love him. But I love...” She shook her head, a plaintive note of misery suddenly entering her voice. “I was a little girl nobody needed. The sisters gave me a home. Food. Education. Purpose. They’re my _family_. My life. How can I...just tell them that meant nothing?”

That hit him squarely in the heart, and now he was the one looking away, too full of memories and emotions for the moment. Closed his eyes, tried to center himself enough to make sense of it for both her and himself. Trying to say what needed to be said, without saying too much. “I was left living on the streets when I was eleven. When I was fourteen, some folk took me in. Fed me. Educated me. Gave me a home. Purpose. They was my family. And so I stayed with them, even when I kept wanting other things, over and over. I loved them. Love them still, really. But...thing is, owing them your life is one thing, but it ain’t the same as owing them your future. You can be grateful without giving them all you got, and all you’re ever gonna be. So if you want that man, you should marry him. And if the order resents you for it, then they never much loved you. You can’t hold someone to you with fear and guilt, and call it love.”

He felt Sadie’s hand on his shoulder at that, and saw her nod in shadowed darkness. Hosea would have let him leave, been glad that he found his own path. Dutch never would have. He could admit that now. “I think Calderón would tell you you should be happy,” Sadie told her, voice about as gentle as he’d ever heard from her. “And I’m glad for you both. Marriage made me real happy.”

Juanita cocked her head aside. “‘Made’? You mean ‘makes’, right?” She laughed softly, her good humor returning. “Sorry. It’s so hard to not correct the people I’ve taught. Don’t worry. Your Spanish is getting very good these days, both of you. One wrong verb or the like here isn’t the end of the world. And,” she reached out, and touched each of them on the arm in turn, giving them a smile, “thank you for the advice, my friends. I have some thinking to do.” She slipped away, presumably to go find her horse or the like, and get back to Las Hermanas.

They sat there for a few more minutes, enjoying the peace and quiet, the low noise in the background of the party. “When you’re a bit more up to it,” she said thoughtfully, “we could always mosey across the border. The law’s spread thin enough in New Austin there’s always a need for good bounty hunters up there. And I’m guessing from these Del Lobo fools down here that Nuevo Paraiso’s much the same.”

“Maybe there’s something to that. Reckon if we can take down at least a dozen O’Driscolls or Pinkertons, one bounty shouldn’t be a problem. And obviously nobody’s gonna give us crap about not hiring a woman--you ride in with the requested dumbass hogtied on Bob, I’d love to see them try to refuse to pay up cause you’re a woman.” 

“Yeah, I guess if you gotta take some jobs driving livestock or the like without me, that’s one thing. That’s the world being stupid. But the rough work like running bounties--no going that alone. We go together, we got each others’ backs. That’s the deal.” 

He reached out and shook her hand. “Got yourself a partnership, then.” He shook his head. “Though some part of me feels like if I’m trying to go honest, I should be trying to leave _all_ of it behind, you know? The rough work included.”

“Don’t gotta be all one or the other,” she reminded him, but gently. “You got the skills. You just wasn’t using them the way you’d like. And what, you want to pin on a tin star for real?”

“Not really. Working for the law means you gotta go after who the law says, whether I agree with that or not. Plus, you get a place like St. Denis where the police are in a man’s pocket, then they’re arresting folk based on a powerful man’s say-so, not justice. And from what I been hearing, from Javier and since we got here, sounds like Nuevo Paraiso’s plenty corrupt.”

“Folk seem to believe in the new governor, from what I was hearing.”

“We’ll see.” He couldn’t help a grim smile. “Bright shiny reformers with big ideas tend to become bastards when the system hands them power. Cause the whole damn system’s broke.”

“Sounds like a Dutch Van Der Linde philosophy.”

“Guess it is. And maybe he ain’t wrong. But his answer to it was. He hid it behind being a man of the people himself for so long, but I’m sure that what we saw was inside him all along. It was just easy to be better, even to do some good things, when times was good.”

She stood up from her own crate, caught him by the hand, and pulled him to his feet. Surprised him by reaching out and hugging him tightly, but he let himself have it, enjoying the feeling, her head tucked against his shoulder. “Hey. What you told Juanita--that was a brave thing, all right?”

So she did see the conflict still in him, that nagging hints of guilt even now that somehow, he was betraying those who’d saved him by saying he should have left, he should have been different. Dutch’s claws still had some grasp in him yet in old instincts and habits, though he was loosening them bit by bit. “Thanks,” he managed. “Better times, better habits, right?”

“Damn straight.” Just then, he heard a familiar sound from the north side of town, near the gate, gunfire and shouts and screams, and Spanish or English or anything else, that was a universal language. Letting go of her, he instinctively hit a crouch, heading for the alley back towards the square, hand reaching for a gun that decidedly wasn’t there. “Shit! Bastards knew folk wasn’t gonna have guns--”

Across the way at Victor's, he could already see a crowd of people rushing to get their guns, or someone’s guns, but it was too late. The whoops and hollers and gunfire were already fading into the distance. A perfectly executed raid, at that. 

In the square, Felipe was already at work on a man shot in the leg. “What was they after?” he asked. “They didn’t come into town to hit the bank or nothing, so what was it? Horses? Out for blood?” 

Felipe glanced up. “They grabbed some horses, grabbed a few people, and then ran. Two dead men out by the stables, apparently, but that’s it.”

“Del Lobos?” Sadie asked. 

Felipe nodded, gazing back down at this patient. “I would assume so.”

Obviously they’d get nothing more out of him right now, so he started searching for someone else to ask, trying to keep out of the still-nervous throng of people. He didn’t have to look long, because someone found him, grabbing his arm. He turned to see Sarah Landry there, her pretty green and black checked dress smeared with blood on the bodice. He hadn’t known she was coming tonight too, and she still wore a kerchief over her face, but he should have figured maybe she would, given he’d seen her and Javier hanging around, obviously sweet on one another.

“Sarah, did they--”

“Ain’t my blood,” she said, shaking her head impatiently. “It was one of them poor men out by the stables.” She looked at him, and he could see her shaking with both anger and fear too great to contain. “They took some of the young men right there, as was playing poker. Too crowded in the saloon for it. Javier and me just got here, and one of them--they recognized Javier. Javi told me to hide when the shooting started, but they grabbed him. Said they got something special in store for traitors.”

“Oh, hell.” A summary shooting, and burning of the corpse, was the Van Der Linde Gang way of dealing with a traitor, but he stood well aware that most other gangs weren’t so clean and quick about it. 

“You was the one who saved him, Mister Arthur,” Sarah said, staring at him. “Told him there was something else for him than that life. I hope you ain’t gonna abandon him now. And he told me you said you knew something about getting out of all that. So you already know a thing or two about killing bad men, don’t you?” 

There was something terrifyingly fierce about this girl-woman, and she wasn’t wrong. He’d kept Javier Arcadio alive, tried to give him a path out by bringing him to Las Hermanas. He should have known if the Del Lobos ever spotted him again, it could get ugly.

So maybe it wasn’t a matter of leaving all of it behind. Sometimes the situation called for a man of blood. But now he knew exactly why he fought, and having that certainty made all the difference. Javier was his responsibility. And if those asshole Del Lobos got bold enough to attack a town when it was vulnerable due to drinking and lack of guns, well, maybe that was a thing as needed addressing.

He looked at Sadie. _We’re riding out._ She nodded, as he knew she would. Of course she’d know what was on his mind, and of course she was ready, and she trusted that he knew whether he could handle it or not. He supposed they’d see on that. 

“Sarah,” Sadie said.

“What?” Sarah demanded, turning on her heel to face Sadie. “You gonna say it’s none of your business? Colored folk in Lemoyne, we know about riders in the night who take them you love and do unspeakable things to them! Can’t fight, can’t say nothing about it, cause we learn young _you don’t get angry_ around white folk or it gets you killed all the sooner. Blame the TB, but I’m about done with all that ‘living scared’ shit if all it gets you is folk being able to take what they want from you and laugh about it!”

“We’ll bring him back to you,” he told her, as she looked back towards him.

Something crumpled in Sarah’s expression then, that majestic towering rage and determination giving way to the vulnerability of how young she really was. “Thank you. And...I don’t want to ask no more than I should, but teach me. To fight. Please. I can’t learn that back home, and I’m tired of hiding.”

It was Sadie who answered her, which seemed only fitting, given he’d seen what she’d become, fierce and fine and a bit frightening. She stepped forward, and gave Sarah a quick, fierce hug. “I learned after a pack of bastards took what I loved. So yeah, we’ll teach you.”

“How many was there?” he asked Sarah. 

“Seven. And they headed east.”

 _Good girl._ She had enough presence of mind to count them, and note where they headed. Sadie looked over at Arthur. “You got the claim tokens. Go get our guns, and anything else you think we’ll need.”

“What you doing then?”

“I’m gonna try to talk Esteban into giving us some clothes we can pay up for tomorrow, cause there ain’t no way you and I can go riding out in this.” She gestured up and down her body, towards her dress. “Me especially.” Her expression warned him if he made a joke about it, she might kill him where he stood.

She had a point there, though she’d missed another aspect of that. “Not to mention they’ll know we was here, if we ride up on them dressed like that. Needs something more inconspicuous.”

“Makes sense.”

He turned towards Victor’s shop, ready to push his way through the throng. Guns, ammunition. They had their revolvers, a repeater, and his bow. They’d have to make that work. He’d have to see if Victor perhaps stocked throwing knives, and maybe grab a bottle of tequila to make a half-assed fire bottle. “All right. Let’s make it fast. We’re gonna lose the tracks quickly in the sand.” 

They made short work of it, given a man apparently looking like he had deadly purpose rather than wanting to get his gun as reassurance made some kind of difference, so he got done at Victor’s shop quickly. It seemed like people recognized he had an actual plan, so they’d leave him to it, relieved than someone was going to handle it. 

Sadie beckoned him into Esteban’s general store where he let them into the back of his shop to change. Plain dark shirt and trousers, throwing a dark red poncho over it against the winter night, and a wide-brimmed hat. He saw Sadie had tucked her braid down the back of her shirt, hiding it, and especially with the loose poncho, she could pass for a smaller man easily enough. Good idea--they’d look inconspicuous enough from a distance this way. “I said we’d leave the fine stuff as security,” she said, slinging her dress onto the counter. “Esteban trusts us anyway, but call it superstition. Me leaving it with him means I ain’t dying tonight and leaving that dress behind.”

“Nothing wrong with a little optimism. We’re gonna figure out the plan once we know better what we’re riding into,” much as he disliked making it up on the fly, but no choice here, given he wasn’t sure where they were going or exactly what the situation would be. Not the job he’d have chosen to resume his somewhat checkered career as a gunman, but perhaps that was the difference between being an outlaw and the good man he hoped to be. Someone needed help, and the criminal wouldn’t care, but the good man would, uncertain situation or not. Walking out the door of the general store and back towards the city gates, he looked over towards the market, relieved that Bob and Buell still stood where they’d been hitched, and that they hadn’t been taken. Heading over towards them, he called back to Sadie, “Let’s ride.”

~~~~~~~~~~

**New Austin Star, December 8th, 1900**  
 _CORNWALL OIL RIG DESTROYED, DUTCH VAN DER LINDE AT FAULT_  
The Wildcat Oil Well near Benedict Point suffered a massive explosion around 2 PM yesterday, causing the horrifying deaths of 6 workers. US Marshal Leigh Johnson has already determined that this heinous deed was carried out by the notorious Dutch Van Der Linde Gang, or what remains of that dastardly entity.

Van Der Linde and an associate, identified as gang lieutenant Bill Williamson, appear to have resorted to subterfuge to sneak onto the work site and plant dynamite on the well during the lunch break of the workers. Van Der Linde continues to exhibit a showman’s desire for attention as prior to setting off the explosives from behind a nearby supply shack he shouted to the workers that this was a renewed attack upon the interests of the Cornwall family, that “The oily t__d of a son will get what his G_dd__n father got,” and also claiming “This is for Hosea and Arthur!” in reference to former henchmen Hosea Matthews and Arthur Morgan, slain in separate battles with Pinkerton agents last fall in St. Denis and Roanoke Ridge respectively. Henchmen John Marston and Javier Escuella remain unaccounted for at present.

Agent Edgar Ross of the Pinkertons promises that pursuit of Van Der Linde and his ilk remains the agency’s highest priority. Joshua Cornwall refused to provide comment, citing preparation for an international trip.

 **Ad placed in numerous major American newspapers, late 1900**  
_CHEAP LAND FOR SETTLERS WITH PIONEER SPIRIT!_  
For those seeking adventure in the American West, look no further than **TUMBLEWEED** , in the Gaptooth Ridge region, a quiet town of wide open spaces and endless opportunity for those with good old go-get-’em American gumption.

Land parcels are available for a very reasonable sum, and the region is delightful for farming and ranching alike. 

Those of an unfortunately tubercular disposition may particularly find the climate to be to their liking in seeking recovery. Those with healthy lungs may find the beautiful sunsets will steal their breath all the same!

Contact R.J. O’Malley, Postmaster, for further details.

 **St. Denis Times, December 14th, 1900**  
_VAN DER LINDE ESCAPES, FLEES TO SOUTH PACIFIC_  
Once again archfiend Dutch Van Der Linde has eluded capture in our fair city, after the horror wrought by his thuggery last year that made the streets of St. Denis a risk for simple, ordinary people to be caught in the crossfire.

Reports from the docks indicate that Dutch Van Der Linde has once again managed, like the rat that he is, to sneak aboard a boat under cover of darkness and flee American territory in search of some more favorable shore. 

Dock workers say that he and several associates likely left on the _Dory Jane_ , headed for the South Seas. We of St. Denis truly may hope that Tahiti or Fiji or even Australia keeps him for good, for the sake of our continued safety. 

But the fact that this man has escaped once again is troublesome to any true American heart that values justice and honor. Police Chief Lambert, Pinkerton Agent Ross, why have you not done your duty? Why have you once again failed the citizens of St. Denis and allowed this man to elude such long-denied justice?

 **Nuevo Paraiso Herald, December 23, 1900**  
_PRESIDENT APPOINTS NEW GOVERNOR_  
After the sudden death of Vicente Alvaredo three weeks ago due to acute gastritis, President Manuel Flores has appointed Colonel Agustin Allende as the new governor of Nuevo Paraiso.

A career Army officer, Governor Allende brings ample experience and vision to the job, and is known as a man of the people, beloved by those who served with him through many years in the military. 

He already has promised to strengthen the state economy by boosting ties with powerful American corporations, including the Cornwall Oil Company, recently inherited by Joshua Cornwall after the brutal murder of his father Leviticus by the merciless Van Der Linde Gang in Annesburg, New Hanover, a year past.

During his inaugural speech in Escalara, surrounded by beaming faces of the common people seeing a local hero elevated to such great heights, the new governor was quoted as saying, “I welcome American investments for the betterment of our people! We are a state rich in culture for those Americans who would seek to learn about the wonders of Mexico, and for those of a more business-like mentality, I assure them Nuevo Paraiso is rich in untapped resources. I applaud Mr. Cornwall’s desire to do business with the Mexican people and help me improve the lot of the common man. I can assure him that we are not so complacent as apparently the Pinkerton Detective Agency and the American lawmen of the states of New Hanover, Lemoyne, and West Elizabeth, are in assuring the safety of a distinguished guest.”


	14. Las Hermanas: May The Circle Be Unbroken III

Tracks weren’t the easiest to discern in the shifting desert sands, compared to the ease with which she could find them back in the deep Ambarino snows. The winter half-moon wasn’t that much of a friend either, casting the night largely into shadow. But for all that, they found the trail quickly enough, headed east just as Sarah said it would.

“We got seven mounted men, probably a half-dozen stolen horses, and what sounds like four captives,” she commented, pointing at the turned-up sands. “Does leave a hell of a trace.”

“Lucky us for that,” he agreed, clicking his tongue at Buell and nudging him into a trot, scanning the trail intently. “How’s your tracking? If they split up later down--”

“Pretty good. Gonna bet it’s better than yours.” She eyed him for a moment, raising her gaze. They’d ridden together before, true, but a lot had changed since then. But as usual, he didn’t bristle at the implication. “I been tracking for years, including in sand back in Tumbleweed. Wasn’t just when Jake and me got to Ambarino that I went out hunting. Had to keep dinner on the table even before that. From what I heard you and Charles talking up in Colter, you learned fast, but you ain’t been reading tracks until right then.”

He gave a quick amused grunt at that. “Fair enough. Though last year was a hell of a necessary education on a whole lot of things.”

She noticed he pulled up Buell and let her take lead on the tracking, giving him a small nod to acknowledge it, turning her attention back to it. Keeping Bob on the trail, she followed the traces south and east, neither of them saying much for a little while. Keeping their strength for what lay ahead, and no need to fill the moment with idle chatter. This business was serious enough, and they’d both likely gone a bit rusty in a year, so better to get her head right.

But eventually, it seemed time to say something. She did glance over her shoulder as Chuparosa’s wall faded into the distance. “Things is gonna be different from how we done it last fall, I reckon.”

“What you mean by that exactly?” He pulled up alongside her.

“We’re different. Back then, we both just charged in.”

He nodded in reply to that. “You did have a tendency to throw a firebottle--literally sometimes--and just get the party started.” 

“The anger was all I had that kept me going, Arthur.”

“With them O’Driscolls, sure. But after? I’m thinking it wasn’t anger that made you make a run for it in Van Horn, Sadie.”  
She sighed, having to acknowledge the truth of that. “Yeah, OK. Wasn’t anger that made you fight like you done, either. But we can admit neither of us much cared if we come out of it alive. So we could fight like that.”

“Sure.”

She tried to think how to ask the question. “Was it always like that with you?” Had he always cared that little about his own survival.

He thought about it for a long minute before answering. “More or less. Got more honest about it as I got older, maybe, but even before, I talked the usual young man’s crap about how I wouldn’t mind dying in some supposed blaze of glory. So I took not caring and called it bravado.”

No point in not being blunt. “You afraid now? Of dying?”

“Yes. And no. You face dying like I done, things seem different. I’m here on borrowed time, however long that is.” He pushed his shoulders back, chin raised. “But yeah, I guess I do want to live. So am I afraid of this fight? Maybe a bit. It’s been a while. Been through a lot. I still ain’t as strong as I was, not yet. I don’t think I can manage a big running gunfight.” He looked over at her. “You scared?”

“A little. I--it was a lot easier when I was that angry. When all that mattered was hurting them first so nobody could hurt me again.”

“There was more to you than that.”

“There was more to you too, and I seen that. But you still done awful things and tried to tell yourself you had no other choice. Loyalty with you. Anger for me. It’s...we would cut anybody we thought we had to in order to get the job done, whether they deserved it or not.”

“That’s true. But the time comes where maybe you see it’s about protecting the innocent folk, not punishing the guilty. You and me, we both decided that at the end. Learned more of that way too this past year, I’d say. Rains Fall, he said that glory comes in serving others, protecting them. I think he’s right in that. If you gotta die or kill to save others, then so be it, and there’s honor in that. But there ain’t no glory in death itself.”

That made sense of it, and what should have seemed like mere semantics actually felt like the total opposite side of the coin. She was out for saving lives now, not taking them, and that felt about right. She’d felt more at peace in saving Abigail than she had in taking down the whole of Hanging Dog. That told her something, if only she’d been ready to fully listen to it then, but a year had given her plenty of time and space for that. “About all I wanted then was to be done with it and be with Jake again.” Praying only that he’d forgive her for what she’d done and what she’d become since then. “I...ain’t in a hurry to do that no more. There wouldn’t have been much peace in that death anyway.”

“So we fight a bit scared, but a lot smarter, that about the way of it?” Trust him to somehow make it better with that cheerfully glib tone. “I don’t know, sounds like a decent trade.” He reached over, hand on her arm for just a moment. “Two of us is all we need, right?”

“Yeah.” She turned back to the tracks, but it felt like something within her had eased. Finally, the trail looked like it wound up and around a bluff maybe an hour away from Chuparosa. The glow of at least one lantern lit up a small adobe house on top of the bluff. “Damn. This is one of the places Felipe was saying might be available for us to live. Barranca, it’s called.”

“Honestly, we can talk about that once the job’s done, but I ain’t sure I consider Del Lobos liking it for a hideout to be much of a recommendation. Might cheapen the price, though. Think we could get an even better discount for cleaning it out?”

She couldn’t help a small laugh at that. “All right, I’m the tracker, but you’re the gang fighter. You tell me the plan here.”

Reaching in his saddlebag, he pulled out his binoculars, studying the house on the bluff. “Ain’t much to see here from the backside. Don’t have a man covering it, even at the house windows. They know nobody’s climbing that bluff, and it’s too tall to throw a grapple, nothing good to catch it on either. Not much cover on the trail slopes, so they’d see us coming. So I say we circle real wide, come back at them from the west along the heights. Let’s get up there first, sniff it out more.”

She hadn’t given him that much chance to show that off last year, given he’d been following her plans, and then in Van Horn she’d mostly been concerned with trying to keep him back as much as she could, preserving what flagging strength he had left. So here she truly saw it--the man who’d ridden with an outlaw gang since he was a child, who’d fought and scrapped against other violent men for territory and scores. A man who could carefully assess a gang’s hideout, and plan an attack like this. Shit. She really should have gotten his advice at Hanging Dog, if she’d been able to think straight back then. “All right, then.” She urged Bob along, headed south so they could swing wide as they’d suggested.

Leaving the horses a ways back, they crept closer on foot, crouched over. Tugging their bandanas down to breathe easier, now that they were out of the dust of the trail, he then pulled his binoculars again. “Two guarding the horses.” He pointed towards the small corral. “Two more with captives by the southwest corner. I’m guessing them last three are in the house dealing with Javi.” A grim, angry note entered his voice at that, and he handed over the binoculars so she could confirm for herself. 

“Looks about right.”

“We pull guns to start, I’m guessing they start killing folk. So silent it is.”

That’d make a contrast to their history of going in loud and messy. “I done my share of hunting. You good on staying quiet?”

He gave her a slight, wry smile, holding up a gun she recognized as her own, handing it to her. She instinctively glanced down, seeing the empty holster, stuffing the gun back in it. She’d never felt a thing. “Sweetheart, you don’t survive by picking pockets for years without learning about how to make sure folk don’t see or hear you.”

Point taken on that. “Maybe we ought to put you to work on that. Make it into some kind of magic trick.”

He shook his head, snorting in amusement. “Afraid I ain’t got the touch that I used to on that. I got a lot bigger since fourteen. Hands did too, unfortunately.” He held up one large hand as if to demonstrate. “Anyway. I done my share of quiet killings. Last year and otherwise.” She wouldn’t ask. Not now. He dug into the satchel at his side, handing her a roll of leather containing throwing knives. “Here. Victor had these. I know you’re good with them.”

She reached out, took them, and carefully plucked one loose, seeing the keen edge, testing the balance. “You?”

He unslung the bow from over his shoulder. “I got this. We both got our knives, if we get close in. Big thing is we gotta get the two of them at the same time, or the alarm goes up.”

“Then we have to get close for me to get a good throw.” She looked at the approach. “There’s boulders for cover, at least.” Peered closely at the house. “And one of the three inside is coming out. Gonna take a piss off the cliff, I’m guessing.”

“Then let’s go while he’s out. Let me deal with the pisser. Then ones near the horses first, then we work our way in.” Rising from a crouch, they went.

It was hard to see in the moonlight, but it must have been a near-perfect shot into the pisser’s back, because he went over the cliff without a living man’s fearful scream at the fall. “Good thing you kept up the hunting with that thing,” she whispered, gesturing to the bow. She knew he’d done it thanks to Charles teaching him, but it seemed it paid off now.

Close enough now, she balanced the knife carefully between her fingertips. Said lowly, “I got the left one in three,” to Arthur, and let fly on the right count. The man went down with a faint grunt, but that was all. The knife in his throat stifled anything else. She saw the other one go down too, and the closest horses gave a whuffle of alarm at the sudden strangeness, but they moved closer, reassuring them with a press of a hand, a few soft words. 

Closer, eyeing now the two keeping guard over three bound captives on their knees. She felt the smooth flow of things between them, how easy it was to work with him, as it always had been. No need to question or explain too much. They followed each others’ lead almost effortlessly, and before long, those other two Del Lobos were dispatched.

Seeing one of the young men’s wide eyes, and hearing his muffled protests behind the gag, no question what he was saying. Begging them to cut him free right then. She paused for a moment, crouching to look into his scared eyes. God, he was just a kid, or barely beyond. “We’re coming back,” she promised him, voice low and soft. But if someone looked out the window of the house right now, they needed to see two figures standing guard over three bound captives.

Just then she heard someone yell from inside the house, “Bernardo? You got the clap that pissing is taking you so long? Jesus, man!” Yelling in Spanish as she’d expect, but she heard the American accent clear as day. The next words were English, with a Texan accent. “Sam, go take a look.”

“Yeah, yeah.” She was ready as the man came out the door, and dropped him.

“Well, well,” Arthur said, half to himself. “So these Del Lobos got some Americanos too.” He looked at her. “Here’s what we do. I’m gonna try to draw him out. Get him talking. You go in the backside of the house. Make sure there’s nobody else left. Then you get the drop on him from behind.”

“He could just come out and shoot you.”

He smiled, a strangely wolfish smile. “He might. But outlaws tend to be curious folk. A lone man walks into your camp after he kills all your men, and then asks to talk, you tend to humor him. Especially when he’s a big fella.”

A sudden shiver went down her spine. “You done that before.” Of course he had. Of course Dutch would have sent a big, strong, intimidating man to do that particular bit of dirty work, just like he had everything else. 

He nodded, slowly, mouth twisted into a grimace. “Dutch liked to call it my ‘paying a social call’. Though I was always supposed to leave the last man alive to shit his pants and then go tell his gang’s boss best to not meddle with us. Some things have changed.”

As she headed for the corner of the house to go do it, she heard him call out almost jovially, “Hate to be the bearer of bad news, but Bernardo’s dead. So’s Sam. So are the other four miserable excuses that was riding with you. You wanna come out and talk? And I do mean talk.”

“Who the hell are you?” She rounded the house, keeping to the shadows, still half-crouched, heading for the backside facing the cliff where she’d seen that open window.

“You heard of the Van Der Linde Gang, friend? My name’s Bill Williamson. I was one of Dutch’s men.” She suppressed an instinctive snicker. Yeah, of course he’d go for Bill. He couldn’t pretend to be Javier, he wouldn’t claim to be his supposedly dead self, and John was off-limits.

“Yeah, I heard about you, Williamson. Heard your gang left a hell of a lot of heat across, what, four states? Pinkertons is still looking hard for you.”

She reached the window, and boosted herself in, landing a little awkwardly in trying to avoid a nightstand right under the window. Held her breath for a second, but the discussion out front continued. “Why the hell you think I’m down here in Mexico, pal? But a man’s gotta earn a living, and from what I hear, you Del Lobo boys got some promise. Right now, you’re a bunch of baby outlaws just fiddling with your dicks. Me? I can help you get serious. You know the Van Der Lindes, you know what jobs we was capable of pulling off. Trains. Banks. Scams. Armored stagecoaches. Not stealing a few horses and--what was you even planning to do with some half-grown boys anyway?”

“Ransom them back if they got folks to pay. If not, well, then they was gonna join the gang if they wanted to live.” Now it made sense why they’d stolen young men.

“See, _amigo_ \--what’s your name, anyway?” In the main room she found Javier, unconscious, and beaten as badly as Arthur had been on Bluestone Ridge, but when she checked, he was clearly still alive, still breathing too. She breathed a sigh of relief herself, then continued on, moving cautiously and silently towards the open front door.

“Bill Shaw.”

Arthur kept up that strangely cheerful menace. “Two Bills, then, how about that? See, Bill, that’s where you done the thing wrong. You go for the kidnapping and horse thieving, at least do your ground work and make sure you know what you’re taking is worth it. This? You’re making a few pesos on this at best, and pissing folk off besides. You go after the rich bastards, the common folk ain’t gonna touch you. Hell, some of them even hail you as heroes.”

She got to the door, seeing the man standing there, maybe ten feet in front of her. Right hand on his gun, but loose and relaxed. She saw Arthur’s gaze never wavered and went to her, but he spoke up next in Welsh, so obviously he’d seen her there. “Another minute.”

Clever. She hadn’t realized they could use that Welsh like this, even down here where their Spanish would be understood. “What was that?” Shaw demanded.

“Let me find out what I can about his bosses,” Arthur continued on, thumbs still hooked casually in his gun belt. She gave a slight nod of acknowledgment, hoping he saw it.

“Seriously, what in hell is that gibberish?”

He switched back to English. “Names for a score I been scoping out, Bill Shaw. Up in Hennigan’s Stead. Some Irishman with far more money than sense bought himself a horse farm just over the border from Tall Trees. Those words? Some fancy-ass Gaelic names he calls a few of them horses. Could steal them outright, could scam him out of them. Those are some horses worse stealing, son, not work nags like these.” He gestured back towards the corral. “You probably heard what happened to the Van Der Lindes up in Roanoke Ridge. Dutch and me, well, we parted ways after that whole mess. Old man done proved after Blackwater that he lost his mind. I need the right men for big jobs, and you clearly need some _vision_ in this gang. So how’s about you and me go talk to your boss--who is your boss man, anyway?”

“Cortez brothers. Esteban and Ramón. Though given the ambitions we got in New Austin, it’d be nice to see someone who ain’t a greaser in charge. Does limit us, you know.”

She took that as her cue, and buried a throwing knife in his back. Better to not get blood on her by killing him up close with a knife. People would be scared enough in Chuparosa already without that horror. Stepping past him, she told him, “Javi’s inside, in the main room. Out cold, beat to hell, but alive. I’ll go free them ones they left out here,” she gestured towards the three still waiting out in the yard.

“I got him,” he answered, whistling for Buell. Retrieving the throwing knife, she wiped it on Bill Shaw’s shirt, and tucked it back into its slot. 

Then she drew her knife and headed for the captives, cut them free, asking in Spanish, “You OK to ride?” All three of them nodded, babbling thanks.

“Ramón, you dumb turd,” the fair-haired one said, slapping another boy on the shoulder, “why did you tell them your papa owns Agave Viejo? He’s only the foreman.”

“I thought it’d take the heat off Jorge, and make them keep us all alive besides!” Ramón protested.

“Yeah, until they found out you were lying and probably killed us all for it!” the third said. “But your looking out for me--that’s, well, that’s…” 

“And being a ranch foreman’s an important job, Tomas, so shut the hell up!” Ramón yelled back at the first boy, pointing a finger. “ _Señor_ Jaramillo trusts my papa like a brother, doesn’t he, Jorge?” 

“He does,” Jorge replied. He grinned sheepishly, ducking his head. “Mostly so he doesn’t have to do all the work himself. He knows he has no head for it.” 

“Well, if we’re done with all that,” she said dryly, “how about you get on some horses and we’ll get you back to your papas, who are probably frightened out of their damn wits.”

She went to help Arthur get Javi settled on Buell’s back. He glanced over at her. “You OK?” he asked, obviously sensing the reminder of last November to her in the unconscious boy slung behind his saddle.

“I’m fine,” she answered. She squeezed his shoulder for a moment. “You all right?” After all, rescuing an outlaw boy who’d been roughed up by a gang had to carry its own reminders. He’d escaped the O’Driscolls and barely made it back to camp before practically falling off Zenobia’s back. 

“I’ll be OK,” he said with a dismissive wave of his hand.

“He’s only beat up and knocked out. He ain’t nearly so bad as you was, not after Bluestone Ridge, not after them O’Driscolls neither. We got to him before they could really start in.” Said it as much to herself as to him, but seeing him like this, healthy and alive and well, able to fight, had gone a long way towards dispelling that ghost, much like looking at him in his finery earlier at Las Hermanas had helped.

“Good work,” he complimented her, getting his foot in the stirrup and swinging up into the saddle. “Another thirty seconds, I think he’d have gone for his gun. Twitchy bastard.” She hadn’t sensed that herself, but she trusted he truly had seen it. Looked like she had her share of things to learn yet. “Looks like we got some boys and some horses to get back, so let’s get to it.” 

“Maybe you should teach me to use a bow.” It’d be a lot more useful sometimes than going in guns blazing. “We done good work on this one.”

“Maybe I should.” He gave her a smile. “We got time. You’re better with them throwing knives than me, so let’s call it a trade.”

Escorting three teenage boys, nearly a dozen horses between the stolen ones and the Del Lobos’ mounts, and minding an unconscious and beaten kid, took most of their attention, so there wasn’t much chance to talk.

The party atmosphere was well gone when they got back, along with most of the crowd. But from the cries of joy as they rode in, obviously some relieved parents had waited. She saw Sarah Landry there, waiting too, sitting on a crate near one of the market stalls. “He’s beaten pretty badly, but he’s alive,” she told Sarah. “We’ll get him to Felipe.”

“Maybe he needs to get out of Nuevo Paraiso,” Sarah said miserably, tears welling in her eyes, and she angrily dashed the back of her hand across them.

“There’ll be time to worry about that later,” Sadie told her. “Right now, just let yourself be happy he’s OK. Ain’t nothing wrong with that. Worry about tomorrow’s problems tomorrow.” 

Sarah gave her a smile at that. “Thank you, Miss Sadie.”

Then she noticed a man approaching Arthur, recognizing the man from the cantina who Arthur had said was running a stock drive to MacFarlane’s, who’d turned him down for the work. She waited, watching, to see what he would say, seeing Arthur standing there with the same wary air. 

“Thank you for my son’s safe return, _señor_. I can admit where I was wrong. If you still want the job, be at Agave Viejo the morning of February 20th, ready to ride.” He offered Arthur his hand.

Arthur eyed him, giving a polite nod of acknowledgment, but not taking his hand just yet. “I thank you for that, but my wife?” He gestured towards her. She could have hugged him and sighed in exasperation all at once. She knew his potential for temper, particularly his defensiveness of her, and willed him to shut up and not say something sarcastic, however funny it would be. Hoped he wasn’t costing himself the job all over again, even as much as she appreciated his stubbornly insisting on trying. “She fought right alongside me. Ask Ramón. She’s the one who killed the last fella. All I did was distract him.” 

“So I owe you both, it’s true. All right. I’ll give it one shot.” He turned to her, giving her a sharp, assessing look. “Though if any of the men on the drive give you grief, _señora_ , that’s really not my problem. If you’re tough as your husband says you are, I’ll trust you can handle that. I won’t put up with them laying a hand on you, same as I wouldn’t the men. You’re one of my stock drivers, you’re treated same as the others. But that means I’m not there to worry about hurt feelings, yours or anyone’s. I’m there to get the job done.”

“Seems fair,” she said with a shrug, and shook his hand. “Sadie and Arthur Griffith.”

“Hilario Padilla.”

Arthur shook his hand next. “Sure. See you in February, Señor Padilla.”

After the Padillas walked off, she saw the tired slump to Arthur’s shoulders as he turned back towards Buell. She could almost sense the weariness gathering in him, and realized that he’d burned through what reserves he had since they’d left Las Hermanas--hours of riding, dancing, the fight at Barranca, hauling Javi out of the house. It was a wonder he’d kept going this long, and she only hoped he hadn’t pushed himself too far already.

She cut him off, stepping in front of him, and blocking him from getting to Buell as best she could, given he had something like eight inches and probably at least sixty pounds by now on her, even if he wasn’t quite back at his full strength. “No. Felipe and other folk can handle Javi. I’m getting us a room, and you’re gonna go sleep. You look exhausted. You _are_ exhausted.”

“I’m--”

“You ain’t fine, and you need to rest, so shut up.” She saw Felipe there already, Pedro by his side, heading for Buell with a purposeful look. “I’m getting him to bed so he can sleep,” she told Felipe, seeing his nod, the crease of concern in his brow, as he looked at Arthur. “Pedro, after you two get Javi settled, can you see to Bob and Buell getting stabled here for the night? Please.” She should see to the horses herself, but right now, she needed to make sure Arthur was OK. Besides, she had to admit she was bone-weary herself, the surge of energy from the fight wearing off and leaving the inevitable weariness in its wake.

“I’ve got it handled,” Pedro called back. She nodded, heading for the adobe building with its bold black-lettered _Posada_ , and thankfully, the innkeeper didn’t ask too many questions, giving them a room upstairs within about sixty seconds, obviously aware of what had happened and accepting that they’d pay in the morning.

Arthur leaned on her some as they went up the stairs, visibly slowing down even further like a clock that hadn’t been wound in a while. She got his arm around her shoulders, her arm across his back. “Come on, big fella. Only a little further.”

Thankfully, he made it into the room, and as she lit the lantern, he sat down heavily on the bed, leaning over, elbows resting on his knees, taking deep breaths. She closed and locked the door. He lifted his head and gave her a tired grin. “Well, here we are at the hotel, just like Felipe suggested. But looks like you and me found another plausible excuse. Even if we was really married, we’re both too damn tired for some good friskiness.”

“Sure, you couldn’t just go for the quiet excuse, you needed the dramatic one,” she joked right back. 

“Anything worth doing is worth doing with style.”

“Dutch?”

“Oh, no. That one was all Hosea.” She laughed at that, able to see it easily now that he said it.

“Get your boots off, and let’s get some sleep.” She heard the soft grunts, the sequential thumps of two boots hitting the floor, as she tugged her own boots off, unbuckled her gun belt, shrugging off her poncho and hat, collecting his, and hanging them on the hooks on the wall. 

Getting under the covers, she blew out the lantern. Lying there in the darkness, feeling the small shifts as he settled himself too, it struck her that she hadn’t shared a bed with someone since Jake. But they’d already shared a room for a year, had that intimacy between them. It didn’t seem all that big a difference. It wasn’t like either of them was going to start sliding hands under each others’ clothes just because of this.

Still, she felt lured a bit closer by the heat coming off him--big man like that, he poured off plenty of it--and it wasn’t nearly so cold as Ambarino, but it was winter all the same. Then she risked tucking up a bit closer to him, reaching out and finding his hand with hers where it rested on his stomach. Felt that startled surprise in him at something new, the same as she had before when she’d take his hand, or give him a hug, but he settled a lot quicker than he used to do. “How are you?” she asked. “Be honest with me.” Her heart felt in her throat for a moment. If thirteen months of agonizingly slow progress could be undone in a few hours spent trying desperately to do something good and fine for other people, that seemed far too cruel.

“I’m real tired,” he admitted. “But I think...that’s just me not being back up to where I was. Lungs don’t hurt none. I’ll be OK.”

“Take it easy for a few days,” she advised him, letting go of his hand only reluctantly, and moving back to her side of the bed. She’d make sure he did, no matter how much she expected he’d argue. Exhaustion quickly won out, and she fell asleep within what felt like seconds.

~~~~~~~~~~

He woke to see the sun high in the sky through the window. Grabbing his watch, still in his pants pocket, he held it up, flipped it open, and swore. “Shit.” Nearly two in the afternoon? He wasn’t sure exactly what time they’d collapsed in this bed last night, but he’d slept hard, that was for damn sure. His empty stomach made irritated protests that supported the watch and the sun. It really was that late. He had needed that much sleep after the night they’d had.

Glancing over at the small table, he saw a note there. Pushing back the covers, getting his feet on the floor, he took a moment before getting up, assessing. A bit sore, given he hadn’t ridden a horse that much, or that hard, for quite some time now, let alone all that sneaking around to get a drop on enemies. A bit tired still, the gnaw of it still tugging at the edges of his consciousness, wanting to lure him right back to bed. It called to him like siren song. But all in all, not much worse than the inevitable crash at the end of long, hard jobs. Though that was usually after two or three days with little to no sleep and pushing himself mercilessly. His reference marks sure had changed.

Padding over to the table in his socks and getting the note, he unfolded it to read Sadie’s neat writing. _Room is paid up so don’t you worry about that. Planning on our staying here for a couple of days. Market is closed today for Christmas, but Señor Gonzalez downstairs has food. Eat something and come find me at Felipe’s when you are up._

As usual, he couldn’t help but be both impressed and daunted by that kind of ferocious efficiency. Sitting back down on the bed, he reached for his boots, pulling them on. Thirty minutes later, after a bowl of goat chili, some fresh tortillas, and a bottle of beer, he felt better on a full stomach besides. Heading over to Felipe’s clinic, he let himself in, and found Paul Landry waiting there. Nodded to him in greeting. “Sarah been here all night, then?”

“Of course,” Paul said. Shook her head, but she did it with a smile. “Though Ruthie just took her back to Las Hermanas to get some things. Dr. Garcia gonna let us stay here in town till the boy’s well again. She does love him.”

“He’s a good kid.” Javi tried to make the best of that fresh start. “Though your girl ain’t wrong. He probably does need to get out of Nuevo Paraiso.”

“Sure, and I can see there ain’t no denying he’s gonna want to marry her,” Paul said, his words slow and measured as usual. “Not sure where he ought to go. Not sure where we ought to go, at that. Me, Sarah, and Ruth got some education at Las Hermanas. Have more yet by the time she’s ready to leave. That don’t impress them in Lemoyne. Too many folk there who set a literate colored man, let alone a girl, about as useful as teaching a cat to read. Gonna think my Sarah’s gotten ‘uppity’.” Arthur caught the flash of fear in his eyes. 

“I heard what you black folk go through. Any excuse at all and it’s hooded rodents standing outside your door at night bawling all sorts of hateful horseshit. You got cause to be afraid going back, it’s true.”

“You know Lemoyne, do you? Sarah been saying she had her notions about that.”

Sarah was too damn smart for her own good, because he’d played that whole thing very close to the vest. But she’d caught on to some of his past, given she’d effectively demanded he and Sadie should teach her how to fight. He scratched his chin, trying to think how best to handle this, how much to risk or trust. It wasn’t that he imagined the man would go turn him in immediately, but even without it being a secret worth whatever his non-federal bounty had been in Lemoyne, that knowledge was a heavy burden nonetheless. No cause to give it to a man unduly. “You really want me to answer that, Mr. Paul?”

He sighed, shaking his head. “No, I reckon not. I don’t much care what you done. What you is now, that I can judge fine enough.”

He gestured towards the back room. “Sadie here?”

Paul shook his head. “She gone looking after your horses, so she said. Left only about ten minutes ago. Asked Ruthie to get a few things from Las Hermanas for you both, though. Said you’d be here in town a few days too.”

He gave a nod of thanks at that, and headed towards the stables, where he found Sadie hard at work negotiating with Jose Soledad for the sale of the Del Lobo horses. “Of course they don’t have papers, they was being ridden by outlaws,” she said, flinging a hand out impatiently. “What, you think we took time to go steal horses last night in addition to rescuing them boys _and_ bringing back the horses you got stolen? You’re welcome, by the way. Now, you buying, or are we just gonna keep them horses and sell them to you at twice the price later when you’re desperate? Or maybe Arthur and me make our own stable. Seven good mounts? That’d be a fine start. These ain’t nags we’re bringing you, _hombre_. Look at that bay Nokota, mister. Look at the chestnut dapple, that’s an Arabian cross if I ever seen one.”

Leaning on a stall pillar, he decided to just enjoy watching the show. Poor Soledad was about to get eaten alive, and he didn’t even know it. Sadie had the matter well in hand, and he’d seen how she drove a hard bargain, going at it ferociously like her livelihood depended on it. It might well have, given she’d been a poor woman, married to a poor man. He remembered haggling like that with merchants when he was a kid in San Francisco, needing to stretch every penny and make it last. He’d gotten out of being quite so dogged about it as a habit when money was easy, when arguing a bargain was more a point of proving he wasn’t going to get screwed over. He’d best adjust that thinking back more towards Sadie’s way, because he’d have to pay attention to finances again in a way he hadn’t.

Besides, the woman knew her horses, and he couldn’t help but enjoy that too as she went on, relentlessly winning point after point. Finally Soledad gave in. “ _Madre de Dios_ , woman, all right! I’m buying, I’m buying.” But he laughed as he said it, handing over the cash.

Sadie handed a bit of it back. “We’re keeping Bob and Buell here a couple of days.”

Soledad nodded, pocketing it. “They’re in good hands.”

She saw him there, and gave a pleased smile. “Well, looks like we got some cash.”

“Sure.”

“You eaten?”

“Don’t need a nursemaid, Sadie.”

She grimaced. “That’s fair. I just...worried, is all.”

“I slept, ate, probably gonna make an early night of it again, I’ll admit. But until then--guess I’m having Christmas with my best gal.”

“Well, everything’s shut up tight for the day except the hotel, and I’m pretty sure we and the Landrys are the only ones staying there.” 

“No matter. We’re here, we’re alive, we done a good thing, we got some work, seems like the makings of a fine day.” Walking back inside the city wall, to the square, they sat on the edge of the fountain across from the mayor’s house. 

Listening to the gentle burble of the water behind them, she tilted her head back, eyes closed. “Ain’t the only work we got. There was a deputy from Escalera who I run into this morning, said we might see some bounties posted at the train station real soon. Seems the new state governor’s of a mind to clean things up.”

“We done pretty good last night, so I think we can manage that.” He’d worried that he’d feel strange about using the old “social call” act, that it would call forth too much of the man he’d been, the man he didn’t want to be. Not as such, in the end. Much like the riding and shooting and the like, he’d found it was a tool. What mattered now was how he used it, not how he’d acquired it, and using it to save those boys, Javi included, no regrets on that. Bill Shaw hadn’t been too bright, and he’d used that to advantage, kept both himself and Sadie from a pitched gun battle. That felt like a decent night’s work. “Well, all right then. 1901 ain’t looking so bad. Sure, we can’t go too far for too long. Every two weeks, me and _El Cactus_ have to get reacquainted. But even if Felipe don’t release me from Las Hermanas by late February, MacFarlane’s and back while driving horses is, what, a week? I can manage that.”

She put her hand on his shoulder, and he could feel by it, by something scared and excited and solemn in her all at once, that this wasn’t the usual casual affection. “Arthur. Felipe and me talked this morning while you was still asleep. He’s ready to let you go.”

He turned, staring at her in astonishment. “What, _now_?”

“Yeah. Well, I mean, in the next few days when we can go finish packing our stuff, and have somewhere to go, sure.”

“But…”

“He said he figured if you showed up healthy enough to go chasing down Del Lobos, even if you had to sleep it off after, that meant you was OK to leave. Take up a normal life.”

He gave a hasty nod at that. “Well, all right then. Suppose the room’s better given to folk who actually need it. God knows the man’s got enough TB patients. And hell, I’m one of the lucky ones. I’m leaving there by walking out, not being carried in a shroud.” He should be happy, he _was_ happy, he’d fought for over a year to try to get healthy enough for this. But here it was, all of a sudden, and the anxiousness churned inside him.

Felipe wasn’t wrong. It was like seeing that prison door open, and stepping out into the sunlight of the whole wide world. Something longed for and dreaded, all at once, because here was his life now, and what was he supposed to do with that? “I’ll work hard, you know that. But--Sadie, I don’t know nothing about this. How to live in this world. I lived only the one way since my momma died, and now all that’s just wasted years.”

“You know more than--”

He shook his head, trying to make her understand. “No, I don’t mean I don’t know how to get by. I mean I ain’t never been out on my own since I was a kid, and that don’t count, that was barely surviving, not making a life. I followed Dutch’s orders, then I followed Felipe’s orders. I lived as--part of something that had its ways. Now you say fine, I’m free, I gotta make my own place. I can scout out a good campsite, sure, for twenty folk and their wagons. I can keep grown men in line. But that room at Last Hermanas, that’s the longest I slept in a single place since my momma and daddy left Wales when I was two. Settling down ain’t a thing I done. Buying a house? Hell, what kind of stuff do you even need to buy to fill up a house? I don’t know _nothing_ about any of that.” The pressure and ache in his chest had nothing to do with TB, or the Cactus, or any of it, and trying to keep hold of those damn unruly emotions took about everything in him. “It’s a good day, sure, but I didn’t know exactly how dumb I am until just now.” 

Her arm went around his shoulders, and she tucked in close, her head tipping in against his. “Look. Jake and me went up to Ambarino all excited for this _big adventure_ we was gonna have. We didn’t know how different things was from New Austin. Nearly died a dozen ways that first year. We barely got the cabin built before the first snow hit. Found just how many chinks in the walls we left quick enough. We was burning pieces of our fences by February to keep from freezing because we didn’t have the first clue how much firewood we was actually gonna need. Lost half our animals that first year to the cold and because we let them roam like we would near Tumbleweed to find enough forage, and predators got them. But we learned, all right? You’re ignorant on some things, Arthur. But you know it, and you want to learn. That ain’t the same as being dumb at all.”

“There was this man I found one day, drunk on a bench in Rhodes, said the bank had taken his home. I helped him, before I knew what he was. Went to his place to get the things he asked for, and I find he was a slave-catcher.” He still couldn’t think of Compson without disgust, both at the man, and at himself for having been so damn gullible. “I don’t...want to become some old fool crying about this lost way of life where I was a man who mattered. Not when that way ain’t worth keeping. But Sadie, I’m tired of being a man who you done more for than I can ever repay.”

“Ain’t about tracking debts. You help folk because you want to. You think it ain’t like that with me too? You done plenty for me, Arthur, even if you don’t see it.”

“If you say so.” Though she wouldn’t lie to make him feel better. He knew that.

“I say so. Besides, that’s what friends do. As for finding a place, all right, let’s talk that out a bit. This is how ordinary folk do it,” and he couldn’t help but smile at the teasing note in her voice. “That place we was at last night--thoughts?”

“Well, between Clemens Point, Shady Belle, and Beaver Hollow, I think we done about enough killing gangs in order to take their living space,” he couldn’t help but quip. “I’d as soon make a clean break from that. Unless we’re looking to collect the whole set, in which case we’d better go live at Hanging Dog and Six Point Cabin a while too. I really don’t feel that particular need, how about you?”

She laughed. She’d let go her arm around him, but had stayed leaning into him, head still tucked up on his shoulder. “Yeah, not sure I need that either. And I ain’t much in favor of it either. It’s nice, it’s quiet, but...it’s a long ride from anywhere.”

“That does make groceries a pain in the ass. We’ll _never_ be able to get supplies without shooting outlaws, I swear.”

Something in her turned serious. “Jake and me thought we wanted to get away from it all. Get away from the government and the banks. and live in the middle of nowhere. Be free of the whole damn world, we said. We didn’t see what we was doing, living hours from any town. Hell, it was well over an hour even to Dormin Crest, and Jeb Whittaker wasn’t there but a few months of the year when he was running his traps. I…there was was, out in the middle of nowhere, and folk with a notion against killing. Just more thing we was unprepared for.” She inhaled deeply. “I’m curious. What would Dutch, Micah, and you have done to Jake and me?”

“Not shot him, that’s for sure. Or hurt you.”

“But what would you have done?”

“Desperate situation as we was in up in Colter, likely taken at least some of your supplies if you didn’t give them to us when we asked. Very apologetically, of course. I would have felt lousy about it, probably protested, and Dutch would have talked me around by making me feel like a bastard for worrying about strangers more than my own family. He would likely have left you at least something so we could tell ourselves we _probably_ hadn’t condemned you to starve. I did tell you we was bad men, Sadie.”

“You ain’t the same as you was. Neither am I. There was things to love about Pinetree Gulch. And we loved each other, Jake and me, but when you see only one other person eleven months or so of the year, and four or five of them snowbound in one little cabin, it does just about drive you crazy sometimes. And if we wasn’t all alone up there, so far from anyone, maybe we wouldn’t have been such a target for them O’Driscolls. Or Dutch, even. I loved that life, mostly. But that don’t mean it’s exactly what I want now, given another chance to decide.”

Now he thought he understood. “So no, you don’t want to live so far out.”

“I think we both need to be around folk, at least sometimes. I grew up like that in Tumbleweed. You had the gang for all them years.” That was true. He’d had people since he was fourteen, and there had been such comfort in that, even when it was only the five of them at the very beginning. Boisterous and annoying and bickering as the family sometimes got by the end with so many people, he’d loved having something so secure to belong to, knowing he had his place and would never be so alone again. 

“Suppose there’s truth in that. And we been a part of something bigger at Las Hermanas.” Felipe had said that was part of the point, giving the lungers a community to belong to, rather than making them live as outcasts. 

“I’d feel safer too.” He could imagine what it cost her to admit that so plainly, but given she’d had her home broken into and lost everything, husband and safety and belongings and future and home and sense of self, he could only imagine that she’d be reluctant to risk it again.

“Given the Del Lobos will hear eventually who done it, given people all over Nuevo Paraiso know, I can’t argue with that. It’s one thing to have a gang hot to kill you when you’re a big camp who can post guards. Could get a dog if we lived out at Barranca, but still, I’d rather not have to sleep with one eye open.” 

“Well, we could still get a dog anyway.”

“Wouldn’t mind that. Though Dido might.” He’d missed having a dog since Copper had passed, right before they let Montana and headed towards the Grizzlies.

“She’ll get over it, assert herself as big sister. It’ll be fine. So maybe we see if there’s a place here in Chuparosa. Close to Las Hermanas, easy to cross the bridge into New Austin, train station’s right there. Other folk around. Sound about right?”

“Just about.”

“There. You figured something out,” she teased him. “We’ll get you on furniture picking soon enough, just you wait.”

“Speaking of dogs, why do I feel like a stray mutt you took in and you’re gradually domesticating?”

“Oh, come on, all you ever needed was someone to believe in you and give a damn.” She laughed, pushing up to her feet. “Besides, you got no idea how effective you are with them big sad puppy eyes you can get. Although,” she gave a playful tap to his shoulder, “I swear, if you shit on the rug, boy--”

He rolled his eyes. “I ain’t _that_ uncivilized. Jesus!”

She gripped his shoulder with the hand still there, and stretched up on her toes, kissing him lightly on the cheek. “No, you’re one fine man, Arthur Griffith. So _Feliz Navidad._ We’ll make 1901 a good year. I can feel it.”

Just a moment’s press of her lips, the merest hint of her breath against his cheek, but it hit him with the force of a horse’s kick, mentally knocking him on his ass. _Oh, no._ Seeing her step back and give him that soft smile, a fond laugh, only confirmed it. 

It was like when sketching something and he’d move a step or two aside, that was all, but just that small change made the whole view different. Although when sketching he’d take that slight move to get the perfect view, and he was pretty damn sure this shift might actually wreck the whole thing, not improve it. 

But there was no undoing it. He’d seen it. He’d acknowledged she was a fine-looking woman long, long ago, because that was a hard thing to ignore, particularly as she came out of her grief at Clemens Point and beyond. But that hadn’t _mattered_. Now it did. 

“You all right?”

“Been a while since a pretty woman did that,” he wasn’t sure how he managed the joke, and how easy and carefree it sounded. But he’d gotten good at covering things up in his time, hadn’t he?

He’d done this before. Someone showed him some kindness, some attention, some affection, and he rushed to see it as everything he’d dreamed of having. Stupid damn desperate idiot. Look what had happened the last time someone rescued him from death and showed him a way out of the life he’d been living, told him they’d teach him what he needed to survive this new world. Look what happened the last time a woman looked at him like that, like she’d somehow so improbably decided there was something in him worth keeping. 

Of course he wanted her, of course he loved her. Sadie was all the heart-stopping force of Dutch and Mary combined, the savior who also happened to be a beautiful and funny and clever woman. He’d fallen for both of them to the point of years and years of faithful obsession, so how could he not fall for Sadie? She was far better to him than either of them had been, because she’d proven over and over that she cared, that she saw him honestly enough, rather than what role he had in her own dreams. Of course he would see it now, right as he set foot into a new life and let himself start to hope and dream, and she kissed him, even chastely as that. 

_Goddamn you. You ain’t doing this again. You’re too old for this kind of stupidity, you need to stop being like this. She kissed you on the cheek, that’s a kindness. You really want to lose everything good you got with her by mooning over her like a schoolboy?_

No, he didn’t. She was a good friend, probably the truest and best he could ever claim in his life. That had stood him in far better stead this past year than any kind of romance, and it would outlast anything of the kind. He couldn’t bear to lose all of that for the sake of his foolishness cropping up again at the worst possible time. 

It wasn’t like he didn’t know how to deal with disappointment, and living without things he wanted so much. He wasn’t meant for all that. He’d known that for years and years, and this changed nothing. So he’d tuck that heart he’d been dumb enough to break once again safely away, until it settled down again to a dull ache and something resembling sanity, and get back about the business of living. He’d be grateful for what they did have between them, because it was something precious. 

Mind made up, that helped things. She pressed a coin into his palm, and he glanced down at it. A copper _centavo_ , and he held it up between his fingertips. “What, this the penny for my thoughts?” No chance in hell he’d tell her, not for a million dollars. He would never trouble her with any of that nonsense. Thank God he was tired enough to still sleep soundly tonight, plus she’d kept to her side of the bed last night. He’d get things back on even keel soon enough. 

“No, it’s payday and it’s Christmas, so make a wish.” She nodded towards the fountain, a coin of her own balanced readily on thumb and forefinger.

With a flick of his thumb, he flipped the coin into the water, and that traitorous heart of his wished before he could help it. _I wish I could be a man worth you seeing me like that._ Well, if wishes were horses, beggars would ride, so he’d heard, so he’d keep the horse and forget the wish.

Better to focus on realities anyway, and the fine things that he did have, not chasing silly hopeless fantasies. “So you think there’s a place for sale here in Chuparosa?”

“Felipe had heard there’s a house by the market. Doubt we can get a look inside today, but worth a stroll by, I’d say?”

“Then let’s go have a look. Make sure it’s a better sight than Shady Belle, at least.” Hearing her laugh, he couldn’t help but smile at it. 

“So fewer alligators, broken windows, busted walls, and corpses? My, you do know how to have high expectations.” 

“Well, you know I wouldn’t have nothing but the best for you.” He meant that, heart aching with it, even if she thought he was teasing. She deserved the best the world could give her, and that included far better than him.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
Guess being able to hunt down some Del Lobos in the interest of retrieving their captives proved to Felipe that I am OK to be away from the TB ward, so for Christmas I got the present of hearing I should go live my life.

Now Sadie and me plan on living in Chuparosa, and we have some prospects for work from folk who was at that fiesta and now believe us able to handle a gun and get a job done. So that makes us hired guns. Mercenaries, which somehow sounds even less honorable than being outlaws as it implies a man being true only to the $$ Almighty Dollar $$ (or Peso, down here). But how is there less honor in choosing what jobs to take, and seeing who needs help, rather than being blindly obedient and beholden to the same master and his demands? I lived that way for far too long and I ain’t doing it again. So I will do my best to live by my own honor this time.

1901 is coming in only a few days. With such a big change, everything feels possible, yet nothing is certain. Things is complicated enough already but seems whatever power is out there thinks I can handle more yet. Sadie kissed me on the cheek for Christmas. For luck, she said. I saw that smile and laugh of hers, pretty as anything. I realized just how much I wished she’d kiss me again, and a hell of a lot more besides.

Knowing how fragile life is will influence a man’s thinking. Seen men shaking at the knees after a brush with mortality. Usually looking for a woman to go prove to himself he’s alive, by doing the thing furthest from death.

Is that all this is? I walk out from the valley of the shadow of death, turn to the woman who’s walked beside me through all of it, and I suddenly see that, along with everything else I already admired? Feels like there’s no coincidence in that. 

Some things may have changed in me. But my heart has me dancing a familiar tune again, idiot that I am. I have loved before based on someone simply showing me some attention, and she’s far better to me than Dutch or Mary, but I can see old, bad habits at work. I cannot trust the feeling. Besides, she’s made it clear she’s done with all that and even if she wasn’t it wouldn’t ever be me. What kind of man keeps longing after women as will never have him? It must be an even worse piece of madness when you see your foolishness clear as day but still run towards it. Seems tuberculosis ain’t the only sickness I got.

This is a fine piece of absolute lunacy, even for me. At least Sadie’s always been kind and fair. She likes me. Liking, that’s even harder than loving. Saw that with Mary, who loved me but didn’t like me. 

Sadie does love me too, though, along with the liking. Just that particular way of loving ain’t part of it. I wish I could go back to it being that way for me. Wanting like this, it’s like walking on quicksand. What we ~~had~~ have is something steader and truer in the end. So no need to trouble Sadie with any of my damn STUPIDITY and probably lose one of the best friends I’ve had. I’ll get a rein on it soon enough. I’m too old to be this much of a fool. I ain’t spending fifteen years again fixated on something that is never gonna be. 

**Sketch of Chuparosa square with dancers, musicians on the cantina roof, and people with drinks in hand** , captioned “Merry Christmas, Chuparosa style. From what I have seen across the years it seems that the folk who live the hardest know best how to celebrate what joys they can find.” 

**Sketch of Barranca and the cliff** , captioned “While after last year I cannot say I have grounds to object to moving into a place I helped shoot up, it was tired habit that Sadie and me agree is another one best left in the nineteenth century. Better ambience than Shady Belle or Beaver Hollow, and I imagine the view is spectacular. But we have enough ghosts and it is far out by its lonesome which has its own problems, especially with wolves both human or canine in this desert. Decided we will do better living elsewhere.” 

**Sadie’s Journal**  
Our Christmas party started out nice and then turned into a bit of a brawl. Del Lobo riders came and took some town boys and horses, so Arthur and me chased after them. Brought everyone back safe, and those Del Lobos got to spend their Christmas down in hell which seems about right. 

Things have changed all of a sudden. We went to have some fun at a fiesta and instead we ended up in a fight, and the end of it all is that Felipe has let Arthur go from Las Hermanas early. I ain’t sure I was ready for that. I can say for damn sure he wasn’t. The life he had may have prepared him for many things, including attacking outlaws soundless as a ghost, but it has left him very unprepared for others. I can tell so much about this scares him. 

It scares me a bit too. Jake and me rushed into things after dragging our heels for far too long and I don’t want to rush things here. I have been the sort to be too hesitant, and then too impulsive. I can see that now. Sometimes that whole thing works out to the good. Had I been calmer and more rational that night at Copperhead Landing, Arthur would be dead. But there must be something in the middle. 

Maybe I found that in fighting them Del Lobos and not charging in trying to get my fool self killed as I would have. But I cannot live everything like it’s a fight like I was, or like biding my time waiting for things to happen as I was in Tumbleweed or Las Hermanas. There has to be some kind of balance and I still am seeking that. 

So maybe Arthur ain’t the only one who has been waiting to figure out how to choose to live. Maybe I never fully figured that out either. I chose Jake, and could I go back to ‘88 I would choose him all over again. He is the one choice I know I made, without question. But then we let the farms make our choices for us over and over until we wasn’t so much choosing Ambarino as running away to the one place we could afford to run. We made the best of it and we was happy far more often than not but I do wonder what things would have been had we seized our future with both hands rather than taking what was left to us. 

Then with Dutch’s gang I was there for having no other options at the time. Arthur? Sure enough, I suppose I chose to not leave him on that mountain, and that meant Wapiti and then Mexico, but my God, how could I have done otherwise? So maybe I am better at haggling for a house and picking out curtains, and if he wants to learn that and feel better so be it, but it feels I am no wiser than him at calmly and deliberately choosing my own path. 

So going forward, it should be not too cautious, but not with blind haste. I don’t know exactly what that looks like but I believe I have always needed it. It’s a thought to carry into 1901 anyway. 

( **Tune and lyrics in Spanish and English for “La Llorona”** )  
Collection notes: “Heard at Chuparosa on Christmas Day, 1900, from Rosita Gonzales, singer and co-owner of the Chuparosa inn. Bought her a tequila, and she asked me to sing with her someday.” 

Personal notes: “Song about being in love with a woman and being miserable with the weight of it. Pretty sure the guy drowns himself at the end. Very cheerful stuff. Although I can’t poke too much fun given I was about ready to die rather than live without Jake. Guess that makes it hard for me to hear a song about love and death even still. Dying for love sounds romantic enough but living for it is far harder and braver in my opinion.” 


	15. Chuparosa I: Breaking The Wheel

The government out in Escalera was as good as their word, and now, two weeks after New Year’s, she and Arthur stood in the train station, staring at a veritable collection of bounty posters. “That’s eight of them,” she said, unable to help some astonishment. “Well, seven people, and one jaguar.” 

She tapped the poster for “Sombra, La Giaguara Negra”, offered by the ranch owners of Nuevo Paraiso. “Heard about this one not too long after we got to Las Hermanas. Apparently she’s been quite the nuisance.” 

“400 pesos--it’s what, two to one exchange these days, ain’t it?”

“Just about.” 

“Two hundred bucks.” Arthur let out a low whistle between his teeth, reaching out and pulling down the poster, examining it. “Far better than the bounties for people, that.”

“Bandits are mostly busy killing folk, not livestock. Allende’s clearly got his hands full cleaning house,” she nodded to the rest of the posters, “so maybe the payday’s lower because of that. Saw that in New Austin, we did, after I was about twenty-two and Tumbleweed really started to sink. Get a half dozen posters at once with lower bounties just cause the law was desperate and had to split the funds they could get. Probably they knew folk was getting hard up enough for money to take them bounties anyhow.”

“Guess that also says something about how some folk value a steer against a person,” Arthur muttered in English, leaning in a bit closer. “But being as I’m a good boy and ain’t out to piss off the _rancheros_ , we’re gonna let that bide.” He nodded towards the board, gesturing to the posters. “We’ll grab the lot, sure, work our way through them if nobody beats us to one. But lady’s choice on who we go after first.” 

She scanned the board. Aside from the jaguar, the highest bounty was 200 pesos for Angel Diaz, identified as a Del Lobo. She tapped it with a finger. “Nah. Think we had about enough of Del Lobos just now.”

“Ain’t arguing that point.”

“This boy was last seen near Sepulcro, so not too far away. Maybe him?” Luis Robledo, 100 pesos, wanted for murder, horse theft, and smuggling. “Former Hijos del Diablo member, whoever they was.”

“Ah, the Sons of the Devil. Never ran into them myself. Heard they run up hard against the Pozner boys in Arizona. They got the worse end of that scrap, fizzled out about ten years ago, though we done for the Pozners out in Utah in…” He rubbed his chin thoughtfully, brow furrowed as he remembered. “Back in ‘96, it was. Rough three months. We lost two that year in that war. Danny Wilcox and Jeff Loomis. The Callendar boys’ cousin, Danny was--” He sighed, looking at her with an expression of chagrined apology. “And here I go rambling about folk you didn’t even know, so enough of that.”

She wanted to ask, and didn’t want to ask, if Dutch had sent him to pay those Pozners a “social call” to kick off that war. She suspected she knew the answer anyway. “Don’t matter, Arthur. Them days happened. You don’t gotta pretend they didn’t. And they was folk who mattered to you. You ain’t never met Jake, but you let me go on about him when I need.” She tore down the rest of the posters, tucking them in her satchel, and heading for the door. “Sounds like a bad year.”

Given permission to talk about it, he took it. “Worst we had until ‘99, that’s for damn sure. We’d only lost a few over the years, and well, the one rat we did take care of, but he don’t count. Never lost two in that short a time. Though we picked up Karen, Sean, Tilly, and Mac and Davey, so it wasn’t all a bad year.” She didn’t point out that of those five, only Tilly and maybe Karen were still left alive. He had to see it himself, and that was painful enough. “You had a tough year yourself, by the sound of it. The farms, your momma dying and all.”

“True. Wasn’t all bad, though. Jake and me got married, after all.” She got onto Bob’s back, nudging him into a trot, heading east towards Sepulcro. “Though I guess between you and me, we both got our reasons to not much want to go to Blackwater anytime soon.” It would have been hard to see the hotel, the restaurants, the chapel where they’d been married, the photographer’s studio where they’d posed in their finery, the lake where he’d gotten a rowboat, both of them marveling at that much water and giddily joking about how they hoped like hell the boat wouldn’t capsize. Those days and nights where everything ahead was a giddy dream, an adventure just waiting for them, and they’d been nearly thirty already, but all the same, they’d still been so young, so naive, and something in her ached at the memory.

“You have a hard time going through last winter?” he asked, glancing aside at her from beneath the brim of his hat. She’d noticed he’d bought one that reminded her a lot of his old one, but far be it from her to comment on it. If he liked it and it felt comfortable, all to the good. Besides, she understood now what that hat had meant to him, though his legacy of that hat, and his father, was far more ambiguous than her mother’s necklace and earrings, and Jake’s father’s cufflinks, that had been in the lockbox beneath the floorboards up in Pinetree Gulch, along with their increasingly meager savings. They’d had nowhere to wear them to, so there they stayed. She still wondered now and again who had probably looted those heirlooms since, or if anyone had. No matter. She would never know for sure. 

“Not really. You gave me plenty to worry about that night, and in Blackwater, I was busy keeping an eye out for the law and all. Didn’t leave me much space for fretting and reminiscing. I preferred it that way, mind, so don’t you go apologizing for it.”

“Fair enough, then.” He spurred Buell on a bit as they hit more level ground. “We gotta turn this boy, or anyone else, in to the state _Comandante_ in Escalera, yeah? Bit of a long trip.”

“Yeah. Says something about the state of things down here that there ain’t a lawman posted in Chuparosa, Casa Madrugada, or anywhere else. Maybe that’s something Allende’s gonna change.”

“Maybe.” He laughed, one of those low, sharp laughs that meant he was about to make some kind of sarcastic comment. “A real outlaw’s paradise, this place is. I reckon we could have made a real good living here, just about. Wasn’t no need for crazy dreams about Tahiti.”

“ _Bienvenidos a Bandido Paraiso_ ,” she quipped, and his answering laugh at that was far more genuine, warmer and lighter. “Think Dutch’s objection to that plan was to learning Spanish?”

She’d meant it as a joke, but he took it seriously. “Probably. He wouldn’t take well being in a land where he didn’t know the language or the rules, having all that disadvantage. You’re always staring risk down as an outlaw, even when times wasn’t as bad as when you ran with us. We was always a few steps at best ahead of the law anyway. Dutch was--well, up until the end, he was a gambler, sure, them big dreams of his, but he played his odds smart.”

“I wish I could have known him before.” She’d seen the intelligence, the force of charisma, even then, and even she had been drawn in by the sheer power of it. 

“He was really something, then. That way he talked...I wish he could have been the man we all thought he was. I wish I’d woke up to the truth a lot sooner. Maybe a lot of folk, ours and otherwise, wouldn’t have died for nothing.”

“You can blame yourself for following him too long, but you can’t go blaming yourself for all of that. You woke up to what he was, you challenged him, you think it would have gone well, Arthur? I ain’t sure he’d have let anyone go, and make himself look weak by it. At best, he’d have kicked your ass out and called you a backstabber. At worst, you’d have caught a bullet between the eyes.”

“Just about. Though maybe he would have. If it was Hosea and me standing up against him, and Micah hissing in his ear that we was all deadweight anyway...but no use chewing over the might-have-beens. It’s done. And so here we are, two reformed bandits chasing bandits ourselves. Things have changed in a damn hurry for sure.”

“But we got enough Spanish for it,” she reminded him cheerfully. “Hell, if Nuevo Paraiso wears out its welcome, or it cleans up its act too much, we got the whole of Mexico we could go to now.”

“The whole of Mexico and south, really. South America--Hosea and me talked about that, now and again, when we saw how even the west was closing in fast.”

“Jake and me talked about it once. Right alongside Canada, Australia, places like that. It sounded like things was still more open down there. More opportunity, like what our folks come to New Austin chasing. But of course we’d have had to learn Spanish, and all them dreams of somewhere other than America were too damn big for our wallets anyhow.”

“Well, you two dreamed big enough to move clear from Tumbleweed to northern Ambarino. Then riding with an outlaw gang, chasing off to Mexico? For a gal who thinks she wanted nothing but to save your folks’ farm all them years, you got plenty of hunger for an adventure.”

“I _wanted_ to save that farm.” She sighed, moved to honesty, seeing the defensiveness in her too quick reply, the same attitude that had made her snap at Caroline so many times. “Or maybe I felt like I had to. I don’t know.” Even now something hurt within her at having sold the place, but was it wounded pride, or shame at failure, or simple anger at having not done it sooner? Maybe it was all three braided together into the whip she used to flog herself for about the whole damn thing, and it had become a bad habit.

“Ain’t wrong to want more than loyalty to your parents’ dreams, Sadie.”

“Well, what’s your dream then?”

He didn’t reply quickly, and when he did, his voice was strangely soft. “I still ain’t sure. Everything’s still too new, I suppose.”

She’d seen that in him. There had been moments of strangeness in him these past weeks, withdrawn and tense. But it made sense. The weight of everything changing so quickly, frightening as that had to be, took its toll. Whenever she’d asked, he’d told her he’d be all right, that he only needed more time to keep figuring things out. Given she felt that same pressure, she could understand it all too well. It did make sense he’d want to feel like he could stand on his own two feet, rather than being the TB patient depending on her for too much, so she gave him a little more room. Maybe she’d been too close to stifling him, too eager to help and reassure herself he’d be OK. He was well again, or mostly so, and she needed to stop instinctively wanting to take on everything she could, like he’d needed a year ago. He didn’t need that from her. She doubted he wanted it either. 

She’d risk honesty, because if nothing else, they’d proven they could have that between them. “We’re here for a few years at least, with you needing to go snuggle up with _El Cactus_. But...I don’t know. Beyond that, thinking we should go somewhere new. There’s gonna be good memories here, but there’s always gonna be them years you answered to your TB. And you and me, we’re folk who don’t forget easy. Feels like we need an adventure of our own. Maybe South America?” she prodded him gently. “Argentina. Peru. Brazil, we’d need Portuguese, so that’s harder. But we save for a few years, bet we could get land real cheap down there.”

She could see something in him perk up at the thought. “Damn fine horses down there, so I hear, so maybe there’s something in that. But what, you’re already assuming you’re still gonna be hanging around my sorry ass in another five years? What if you meet some handsome _mariachi_ musician who adores you to distraction?”

“Oh, shut up!” She shook her head, rolling her eyes at his teasing. “You know I said I ain’t of a mind for all that. I had my man. I don’t need another.” But sometimes she missed it. She could admit that, if only to herself. He was a good friend, and having him there meant so much. Claiming him as her husband to everyone had ceased to be so strange, and truthfully enough, the way they lived, she could admit he practically was like a husband in nearly every way but one.

But that one way was an important one. There were times she woke in the night in that bed in that still-strange house, and some part of her ached to feel someone else there that she couldn’t reach out and touch like she could Jake. It wasn’t like that between them, and there were things a friend just couldn’t give, and she couldn’t ask. Probably would have been easier to keep separate beds like in Las Hermanas, but in a small town like Chuparosa, putting in that furniture order would have created its share of talk. Besides, they did a good job respecting each others’ space in that, as they had all along at Las Hermanas.

Besides, the thought of it hurt anyway. There was the bleak knowledge that tattered and torn as her memories of making love with Jake were now, at least she hadn’t surrendered them willingly. If she took another man in her arms like that, even if he could deal with her skittishness at the notion thanks to those Goddamn O’Driscolls, she’d have to admit she could see a world where Jake could be replaced. It was one thing to get to this place where she had, a place where missing him didn’t hurt, where she could think of him sweetly, without it being a knife twisted in her heart. But actually giving him up? So much of him had been taken from her already. She couldn’t lose what was left.

Though maybe in the next five years he’d find himself a pretty _señorita_ or a New Austin gal, marry her, have a couple of kids. There would be no room for their whole fiction in that marriage, especially with a new wife jealous of her territory. She’d be happy for him, because God knew he deserved happiness, but the thought of deliberately backing away to give him that space, how much he meant to her by now, hurt. All those months she’d been so scared to lose him to dying, but she hadn’t thought much about how she could lose him to living. But if it happened that way, it happened, and hopefully she would have time to adjust to it. She was an aunt to kids of Caroline’s she’d never seen. It might be nice to be one to kids she actually could be around to love. 

She couldn’t help but be grateful that they’d come up on Sepulcro, the white adobe walls of the graveyard shining bright in the midday sun. “Great, chasing folk in graveyards again,” Arthur grumbled.

“What, you make that some strange habit?”

“No, but the last time I done it was in St. Denis with John, us chasing some grave robbers for that greasy weasel Bronte so we could get Jack back. Someone’s here, anyway.” He pointed towards a small chestnut horse hitched there, something of a poor specimen. He grabbed his repeater from Buell’s saddle, slinging it over his shoulder. “At least we ain’t gonna end up with the law chasing us.” Drawing his revolver, he gestured towards the gate of the graveyard. “We go in low and quiet. Split up and search for Robledo.”

“I got the north side,” she answered. 

He nodded in acknowledgement of that, but put a hand out to halt her when she headed for the gate. “Let me go in first. If he’s lying in wait and of a mind to shoot--”

“Then I make a smaller target,” she pointed out in exasperation. “Not to mention he might not assume a woman’s here to get him and start raining bullets. Whereas you, big man?” She looked him up and down, giving him a wry smile while she was at it. She’d told him she noticed he went out of his way to put folks at ease when he meant no harm, but he didn’t think about the flip side of that. It was about damn impossible for him to not look instinctively intimidating, and a man with a bounty on his head was bound to be somewhat twitchy by nature. “About the only way you could be more obvious that you’re trouble to a man on the run is if you was outright yelling it the minute you reined Buell in.”

He rolled his eyes at that, but smiled slightly in return, standing aside and sweeping his arm out in a dramatic _after you_ gesture. She slipped through the gate and started moving amongst the tombstones, ears perked and eyes watchful for any sign of someone there.

She heard a grunt, the dull sound of what sounded like a shovel striking dirt, and crept over that way. There he was, or at least someone, a man down in a hole in the ground, top of his head barely visible over the edge of the grave. “Luis Robledo?” she said, pitching her voice loud enough so Arthur could hear. She didn’t hear him coming, startling still in such a big man, and now she knew that was the legacy of that childhood of his where he’d had to be silent as a ghost to pick pockets. Only now did she realize how much apparently he’d gone out of his way around camp to speak up and announce his presence, make up for the silence of his footfalls, and presumably not scare people shitless by sneaking up on them. She didn’t hear him, but she could sense him there, and then out of the corner of her eye, she could see him.

“Yeah,” Robledo answered, carefully raising his hands in surrender. He’d had a miserable time of it digging into the grave, by the look of things, his shirt hung over the tombstone, bronze skin liberally sweat and dirt streaked. He’d been busy chopping into the coffin by the looks of it, a hatchet buried in the coffin lid currently. 

Arthur stepped closer, peering down into the grave. “Now, how about you don’t get stupid and do anything with that hatchet?”

“You two bounty hunters? Haven’t seen a woman doing that.” He peered at her curiously.

“I can point a gun at you just fine, mister. We sure ain’t here to drink tea and discuss politics.”

“Look. It’s been eight years since the Hijos even existed. I survived that, figured that was enough of a sign to get out. Shit, when I was a Hijo, I threw pesos around like there was no tomorrow. Fancy horse, nice clothes, guns, pretty women. You two crazy bastards think I’d be here robbing the graves I dig for jewelry, in the hottest part of the damn day to boot, if I was still running with a gang? I can’t afford land. Not with the prices as they are, with the _rancheros_ owning the whole state.”

“Is he full of shit or what?” she asked Arthur, switching over to Welsh.

“He’s got a point,” he replied. “Grave digging is miserable work, and we done some filthy jobs all right, but as crimes go, grave robbing seems a particular low.” He swapped back to Spanish. “You got family, Robledo? I see you got a wedding ring.”

He hesitated, then lowered his eyes. “A wife. Two daughters.”

“Ah, Jesus Christ,” Arthur muttered, putting a hand over his eyes for a second. Dropping it, he stepped back, and holstered his revolver. “Get out of that grave, and get going before I change my mind. You go home, wherever that is, get your wife and girls, and get the hell out of Nuevo Paraiso tonight if you know what’s good for you, because the next bounty hunters that find you ain’t gonna be merciful. And I swear to God if you’re lying and I hear about you running jobs, or that you’re one of those damn Del Lobos, I _will_ hunt you down and haul you to Escalera for your hanging, you understand?”

“It’s a firing squad down here, _gringo_ , not a hanging,” Robledo retorted, but he got his hands on the side of the grave, hauling himself out awkwardly, scrambling out with hands and knees.

“Keep trying cleverness, maybe you’ll get a bullet right now,” Arthur snapped, hand hovering over his gun.

Robledo gave a tired laugh. “You got some things to learn about Mexico, that’s all I’m saying. The way things work. We got rich bastards gone crooked drunk with power, and poor bastards gone crooked because they’re squeezed so hard. There’s not much room for honesty, not if you want to survive. I wish there was.”

“Just get going,” she said, pointing at the gate, not quite willing to put her own gun away just yet. “Like he said, go to your family and get out of Nuevo Paraiso in a hurry, if you know what’s good for you. We ain’t the only ones as saw that poster.”

Robledo nodded at that, grabbing his faded, patched shirt and slipping it on over his head. He hesitated for a moment, looking at Arthur. “Which gang--never mind. It’s better I don’t know. Something you’d rather forget anyway.”

“I ain’t nobody,” Arthur said, meeting his eyes steadily, giving him a slight nod, man to man. “Just like you, I imagine. Better change your name while you’re at it, Robledo. Hopefully your kids is young enough to not remember that and ask questions. And seriously, don’t you think to steal my horse, or hers.”

Robledo scoffed at that, looking almost offended. “Trust me, my days of horse thieving are long done, _amigo_.” Another hesitation, as if not quite able to believe it, and she saw how he was reluctant to turn his back, afraid to be shot in it. But his stance and walk eased as he made it towards the gate, and before long, the hoofbeats faded into the distance.

“No payday for us,” Arthur said dryly, heading towards the gate himself. “Though on the bright side, suppose it means we’ll get to go home tonight rather than trying to wrestle that fella onto a train to Escalera.”

She hadn’t thought that one out too far, but he was right. With as far as the ride was to Escalera, it was either escort a bounty on the train, or else camp at least one night in the desert while taking turns guarding them. Better to go for the train for now, for Arthur’s sake, plus minimizing riding through Del Lobo territory at that. Mounting up on Bob, reaching for the reins, she looked over at him. “I ain’t complaining. I know why you couldn’t haul him in. Ex-gang fella trying to go honest?”

“Comes across a bit hypocritical, don’t it.” He looked down at his hands, grimacing for a moment. “I had that happen before. When we was at Shady Belle. The bounty, Mark Johnson, he was living out in the swamps with his wife and his boy. He come along quietly, just asked that he could say goodbye to them. Said he’d been living peacefully, left the outlaw way behind. Maybe, maybe not--he said something to his son, turned out to be making him find Johnson’s old gang and setting them on me when we was on the way to Rhodes. Didn’t have much bad feeling about hauling him in after that, at least not in that moment, and I told myself we needed the money, we needed every bit we could get to help get us out. But…” He pulled up his bandana for the ride through the dust of the desert, and she couldn’t help but look at him, thinking there was a strangely forlorn look in his eyes. “Can’t help thinking it would have been better for everyone if I’d just told Johnson to run. Because if it was one of ours they took in the name of arresting them, wouldn’t we run them down, killing whatever folk it took to get them back?”

She couldn’t deny the truth in that. “Sure. It’s what we done in Van Horn, you and me. Milton was a bastard and deserved it, but at least some of them Pinkertons probably didn’t know much. They was just doing their jobs. Guarding a criminal their boss arrested, and then two more come shooting the place all to hell.” It felt so simple in the moment. Abigail needed rescuing, and they were the only ones who gave a damn enough to do it. She couldn’t regret that even now, because it was fighting back against Milton playing dirty as hell, and the part of her that grew up with clean hands and soul still instinctively felt some outrage that a man who called himself an officer of the law could get away with shit like that, and not feel any moral qualms about it. Milton provoked that battle, and he’d died by his own crooked rules. But she couldn’t take pride in it either. In the end, it all just felt like such a waste. They would have killed anyone who stood in their way to save Abigail. They’d killed at least a dozen Pinkertons there to do it, and she couldn’t believe they’d all deserved to die. 

“Just about. That bounty on Johnson was forty bucks, when we had near two thousand saved. Four or five men I killed on that road so they couldn’t take him back. Another family whose lives I ruined cause I killed a man by insisting that adding a few bucks to Strauss' damn ledger was the most important thing. Didn’t learn my lesson from Thomas Downes fast enough. Hell, that’s a thing I should have learned from them bastards as killed Eliza and Isaac. A few bucks ain’t worth destroying someone’s family. And there’s no fixing it. About all I can do is admit that, and do the right thing the next time.”

It was hard to know what to say, what wouldn’t trivialize painfully won knowledge. “This time, you done the right thing.” It didn’t excuse it, much like she couldn’t excuse herself for what she’d done and become. But it set it in the past at least. He was right on that. A hundred pesos, fifty bucks, wasn’t worth the misery of ruining a man who was doing his best to make amends.

“I suppose. But eight years, he said, and the law still wants him. It’s a narrow path I got ahead.”

“What you mean by that?” 

“Being realistic. Law ever finds out I ain’t dead, that’s it. The way they see it, you can't buy back what you done by doing good things. And bank robbery, train robbery, they got a statute of limitations. Things fade. Maybe I can outlast that. Murder? That don’t ever go away, and killing is a crime that they say you pay for only in blood. So they ever find me, it don’t matter what life I’ve made, how much I’ve changed. I’ll hang. Just like Johnson did.”

He wasn’t wrong, and the sudden stab of fear for him hit her hard. Though it wasn’t only him at risk, was it? “If they ever identify me, I will too. Maybe I didn’t have the price you did, but them Sisika guards, folk on the train, Pinkertons in Van Horn, Colm’s hanging--I wasn’t exactly lying low myself.”

“You sure wasn’t. And I suppose a woman riding with an outlaw gang is going to attract notice.”

She felt herself blushing in embarrassment. “Don’t help much that I was yelling at O’Driscolls in the streets to call them out, and mentioning Jake’s name. The ranch. All of it. Maybe it ain’t gonna be too hard for Pinkertons to figure my name out if they want. I was...acting pretty crazy.” 

“Yeah, well, so was I. Telling everyone out there I was helping my real name, could have gotten me arrested in about five minutes if I done it with the wrong person. Thing is, I gotta accept my life for what it is. I’m always gonna be a man on the run. Till the day I die, I got the law on one hand trying to kill me, and TB on the other. My own personal Scylla and Charybdis.” 

It seemed like an apt metaphor. “Don’t mean it ain’t still a life worth living, though.”

“I know that. Hell, if anything, makes me appreciate every day I get all the more. Just being honest. If I don’t admit the way things really is, I get careless.”

“Nothing wrong with that. But seriously, you don’t get to claim you’re a moron ever again if you’ve read The Odyssey.” He laughed at that, acknowledging the comment with a wave of his hand. They rode mostly in silence the rest of the way back to Chuparosa, and dropping the horses off at the stable, it was only a short walk through town, giving a nod and greeting to folk as they passed. Warmer greetings than a few weeks prior, when she and Arthur had been just folk dropping in occasionally from Las Hermanas, rather than residents and acknowledged as the heroes of the hour from the Christmas fiesta. Stopping at the market to pick up some food, heading for “Oso” Gomez’s butcher stall herself, she saw Arthur talking to Teodora.

Back at the house, things had started to settle into a bit of a groove now, three weeks later. It was a good place, near the market. Gotten it for a song, just about, with the goodwill coming their way after Christmas, but the place did need some work. Good bones, though, having a cool and shady first floor with the kitchen, a small sitting room, some storage, the overhang of part of the second story creating what amounted to a shade porch beneath it. Their bedroom was up on the second floor, and he’d briefly argued maybe he should sleep in the second, smaller bedroom, before she’d told him the chivalry was appreciated but unnecessary. They’d shared a room all this time already, could share a bed and respect each other’s space. No need to buy a second bed, and make the neighbors talk by it anyway.

Still waiting on buying a lot of things, bit by bit, so their things were still mostly in crates borrowed from Esteban and from the market, but they had a bed at least, and enough stuff to cook with, and that was a good start. 

He’d learned enough cooking in the Las Hermanas kitchens to help out, and making dinner turned into a comfortable routine between them. She and Jake usually took turns on nights cooking while the other was busy with the endless outdoor chores, so the sharing the workload was the same, but the way she and Arthur had put it together was new. They could afford that, given they didn’t have chickens to tend, or anything like that. “What’d you get from Teodora today?” She gestured to the fruits on the countertop with their yellow, orange, and red skin that reminded her a bit of a sunset. “Mangoes?” It felt like there was always something new to try, and it was better than the likes of the old, mealy apples and potatoes they’d insisted on eating out in Tumbleweed.

“She had some from down south.” She saw the hint of a sly grin on his face. “Considering we was supposed to be overseas farming them by this point, I did figure we should try them and see what all the fuss is.”

“Without the need for passage to Tahiti? A real bargain!” She reached for one of the mangoes, turning her knife on it, slicing it open and passing him a piece of the golden-fleshed fruit, taking one herself. Taking a bite, she decided she could definitely go for them in the future--sweet, juicy, a faint hint of tartness at the end. Not quite like anything else she’d eaten in her life. “Verdict?” she asked him.

He took another bite, savoring it thoughtfully. “Maybe we do need to save up for a mango farm.” He reached for another piece. “I gotta admit I miss a good apple sometimes, though. The taste of it.”

“Cherries,” she answered him wistfully. “Lord, I learned to love them up in Ambarino. Never tasted them living in the desert, and there was this wild cherry grove just a bit further up the creek. Ate myself sick on cherries that first summer, just about.” Jake had wondered jokingly if she was pregnant, and she’d wondered now and again herself, given her bleeding times had been so erratic anyway, hard as they were working. Mingled hope and dread at the thought, because she was so careful with using that sponge, but nothing was foolproof. But about every time she’d started to seriously wonder, the bleeding started again. 

“Thought you said you wasn’t the little wife baking cherry pies?”

“Said I wasn’t stuck in the kitchen all day with flowers in my hair. I was busy doing a hell of a lot of other things. Me? I like a good cherry pie just fine.”

He moved past her, reaching for their plates, and headed for the stairs up from the kitchen to the second story, taking the turn that led to the roof of the kitchen, this one making sort of a sun porch. Beautiful place to eat, or read or stargaze or anything else, when the weather was clear as it was tonight. She followed, carrying the utensils and a couple of bottles of beer. The water could be hit or miss still for drinking, and with so little rain, it was better to just drink other things most times and save the water for washing and cleaning. “No joke, I did eat myself sick on oranges in San Francisco once.”

“For real?” They sat down on a couple of crates, much like they would have back at camp. She still wondered sometimes if this semi-vagabond life they were living yet made him feel more comfortable. Maybe it wasn’t a bad thing that he eased into filling this place with all that furniture and the like. He’d joked that he at least appreciated the charms of an actual bed now, after over a year at Las Hermanas.

“A lot of us street brats was living near Chinatown. Easy for us to disappear there, even being _gwailo_ \--white--like we was. Crowded slums and all. We kids was folk the city wanted to shove away and ignore every bit as much as the Chinese. Some of them Chinese was kind, though. Used to be this one lady, Fei Ling, as owned a noodle shop off this alley we used to hang out and play dice, and would sometimes give us a meal, claim she made too much. Couldn’t do more for us than that, and once every few weeks at that, she was just getting by for herself while her husband was out in the gold fields. But--I remember that.”

“What happened?” Somehow she had the feeling this wasn’t going to be a lighthearted reminisce. Sitting at the table on the rooftop, watching the sunset over the desert, she cut a piece of steak. Beef was cheap enough here in Mexico, giving the ranching, though they likely should go hunting over the next few days, because a bullet and wild game were even cheaper.

“The usual. White folk pissed off, claiming the Chinese was somehow ruining things for _true Americans_. Turned into a huge two day riot in July of ‘77 that near destroyed Chinatown. This other boy and me, Benjamin Davidson, Benji, we was picking pockets on those rioters left and right. Stole a whole crate of oranges off a wagon in the chaos too. Ate too many of them right then, but when we hadn’t eaten much for a couple of weeks before that, and we knew the minute other kids heard about it we’d have a fight on our hands…”

He said it so casually, as if that bleak way of growing up, of being so used to brutality that even a riot became an opportunity necessarily seized rather than a thing to hide from in childish terror, had been nothing remarkable. “This Benji, he was your partner in thieving stuff, huh?”

“It was every kid on their own, sorta, but we did have--it was looser than gangs, but kinder than an alliance.”

“So he was your friend.” 

He hesitated for a moment, then nodded, forking up some corn from his plate. “Just about. It’s as good a word as any.”

“Why, what else would you call him?”

He sat back in his chair, obviously pondering the question. “It’s hard to know. You do things, living like that. He was the one I huddled up with in winter so we both wouldn’t freeze. We...looked out for each other.”

“Your brother, then.”

There was a flash of something in his eyes, all at once irritated and vulnerable. “A brother don’t kiss you. He did.”

That knocked her wrongfooted for a second, but she recovered, waving a hand dismissively. “You worried about that? What’s so odd about it? Hell, I kissed one of my girlfriends when I was that age. That’s normal kid stuff, when you’re too young and shy still to be around boys--or girls, for you.”

Now that look in his eyes turned to definite anger. “You think I was ignorant about all that business?” He took a long swig of his beer, words forceful and clipped. “I seen whores doing their business in the alleys from the time I was eleven. I’d run errands for them as lived in parlor houses sometimes, heard their talk. Saw girls running with us street brats get old enough to start selling. Had men ask to buy what I wasn’t of no mind to sell, but I damn well got close enough a few times to it. Wasn’t no room for naivete in all that. You grow up fast and hard. Any love you find in the middle of that world of shit--”

“So you loved him?” There was that moment in her head of thinking of sin, of Uncle Robert calling it a sickness, kindly enough but still knowing it for something to be rooted out. But then there was the memory of gentle, kind Marion, the light in her bright blue eyes at talking of her Maggie, so looking forward to being reunited with her, wanting so much to be seen honestly at the end of her life. Was it a sin, really, to simply love, especially in such a loveless place? 

“I suppose I did. Benji kissed me, once. Then two days later, they caught him robbing a grocery store. Didn’t hang him, at least. Petty larceny, and he was only sixteen. Shipped him off to some reform school. Three months later, Dutch and Hosea found me, and that was that. I never knew what come of him.”

God, his life. It seemed like one long red blur of pain the more she heard about it. She blurted the question before she could help it. “So do you like women, or--”

“No, I like women just fine.” He gave off a rueful smile, looking down with that hesitant way he sometimes had. Perhaps he wasn’t wrong that he wasn’t naive, and she’d heard him cheerfully singing dirty songs and making filthy wisecracks, so there wasn’t any prudishness in him. But there was a certain shyness, all the same, and it was endearing. “I like women better than they like me, it seems.” He eyed her across the table, toying with his beer bottle now. “That friend of yours, that really just ‘kid stuff’, or is that the preacher’s niece talking too loud?”

“Oh, now you want the sordid details of my love life?”

“Call it being moved to honesty. Plenty I didn’t talk about all these years, and clearly, it ain’t done me much good. Maybe it’s best to just get the whole lot of it out in the open for once.”

“Well, you ain’t run screaming at me seeing me turn into a crazy murderess, I suppose you’re a hard man to terrify.”

That smile turned sharper, daring her, and there was a gleam of challenge in his eyes. “Try me.”

“I…” She shook her head. “Dunno how you see it so simply as that.”

“Ain’t hard to not worry about what society thinks when you’ve told it to get lost for most of your life. There’s plenty wrong in the world. I ain’t sure two folk loving each other is hurting nobody. It’s a rough enough life all too often, we really need to make it any harder?” He gave a half-shrug. “It don’t reflect badly on Jake, you know, if you had loved someone else. Ain’t like you loved him any less, or less well for it. You still chose a life with him, yeah? I said it to Juanita, but maybe you should be hearing it too. Any love demanding it’s gotta have all you are and ever will be, well, that don’t feel quite right.”

She instinctively bristled at that. “Jake and me wasn’t nothing like that. You don’t--” She stopped herself before she could deliver that particular blow. No, he didn’t know, and it would be nothing but cruel to fling that fact in his face. 

He put up his hands in surrender. “All right.”

But maybe he wasn’t wrong about the other thing. “My best friend,” she answered finally, not quite meeting his eyes, but it was easier to say it without that. “Laura Campbell. I--I don’t know if she liked me like that. But...yeah, I liked her. I...loved her.” She’d thought all too often about those kisses, and sometimes dreamed of more than that. She’d told herself later that Laura had been only a childish thing, from those days when she was too young to spend much time with boys, and when Jake was still too close, more like a brother, for her to see him like that. But even now, she could remember those on those days, that fine and giddy feeling, that joy and agony both. Looking at the memories honestly, she could admit that had Laura been a boy, she would have called that her first real love. Jake had become the love of her life, true, but that didn’t mean Laura hadn’t mattered too. “Her family moved away when I was eighteen. I wrote her. Never heard back. I cried. Told myself it was at losing such a good friend. I suppose it was a lot more than that.” She took a hefty drink of beer at that, somewhat startled at her own words. 

“Well, look at that. The sky ain’t opened and God ain’t struck you dead.” He raised his beer in salute. “And I’m guessing if she was kissing you back, sure, she liked you just fine.”

Now curious, like testing the boundaries of some world she hadn’t realized was there until now, she pushed further. “I ain’t felt quite like that again, and I would never have stepped out on Jake. I promised him that. It was him I wanted. But...maybe I still notice women. Sometimes.” Shocked at her own daring, but it felt good all the same.

“Women are a fine sight worth noticing, I gotta agree. And married ain’t the same as blind, I guess. You probably noticed a good-looking fella or two while you were at it.”

“What, any other fellas catch your eye since Benji?”

She’d meant it almost teasingly, but now he did look away. “A few." He paused. "Dutch was one, once,” he said, so softly she barely heard him. “When I was just turned seventeen. Hosea and Bessie was gone that summer, tried to go straight for a few months. So it was him and me, and he was teaching me to shoot, saying we was getting ready for bigger things. Spinning all them grand ideas. Telling me I was this integral part of the thing. We was closer than ever. And...Dutch saved me. I loved him. I would have done anything for him, just about.”

Oh, she could imagine. Seventeen, so young, vulnerable as anything in some ways despite the hard years he’d lived. “Did he ever touch you?” She tried to not make the words sound harsh, maybe make him think it was his fault. But she swore to God if Dutch Van Der Linde had laid a hand on Arthur as a boy, taken even more advantage of that love and trust and admiration and anxiousness to please in order to bind his protege to him even more fully, she would want to hunt that man down and kill him, preferably slowly. Maybe she was trying to leave the worst of herself behind in the past, but she could summon that savage ruthlessness back for that, no question. 

“What? No. I never said a thing. Them feelings passed soon enough, by the time Hosea and Bessie got back. After that, things went back to how they ought. I admired him, I loved him, but wasn’t nothing like that.” 

Well, at least she could maybe give him some wisdom back, repay him for giving her the room to acknowledge that about Laura. “That one, I know you _do_ grow out of. You being a bit lovesick for a while, that wasn’t nothing strange. I had the stupidest infatuation for this gunslinger when I was eighteen. Grown folk, when you’re that age, you look up to them. Seems like they know everything, so you want them, and want to be them, and want to impress them, and want them to notice you, all at once. And sure, given how much you loved him, how much you thought you owed him, makes sense that it was Dutch you wanted to notice you.”

She could see the blush creeping up into his cheeks regardless. “I think he noticed something about me that summer, anyhow. He, ah, next time we went to town, he took me for a drink at the saloon, told me I’d obviously grown up a lot that past year, and to head upstairs because he’d paid my way.”

“Ah, so a frisky young Arthur finally discovered the charms of women,” she teased him. He gave her an awkward smile, not meeting her eyes. “What, didn’t go so well? Hell, it don’t for most people until they get the hang of it.”

“I went and done it, anyway,” he said, awkwardness in his words and the line of his shoulders and the way he still didn't look at her. “Did it again a few weeks later when he paid again. I didn’t want to make him feel...he was being kind. It was all right. I'd been curious, sure. But I’d heard working girls--hell, working boys too--talking back in San Francisco when I was a kid. Making jokes about how it was lucky men was always gonna be so desperate, how ridiculous they was with their pants down. Making it so they could get through it better, you know? Couldn’t forget that. So the whole thing just seemed...real sad, I guess. Felt good enough, sure, but all them fellas constantly whining about going without, I don't understand. It was just some piece of bad theater with both of us acting our parts. Not worth all the fuss. I told Dutch I'd pay myself the next time and I guess he figured I'd gotten a proper taste for women, so sure, he'd done his job.”

Now she realized she’d misread him again. Fine-looking man in his thirties, never married, and he’d admitted he’d messed around plenty with his sort-of fiancee, and then gotten drunk and fathered a child with a woman. She’d so readily assumed he had a wild hellraising youth with women, fit to match that defying the rules mentality as an outlaw, before the whole business with Eliza scared him into some sobriety. Still, even then she’d figured, men being as they were, that loneliness and lack of a wife meant he’d strayed sometimes. Now she pressed carefully, wanting to make sure she didn’t misunderstand yet another time. “You and Mary fooled around, you said.”

“That was different. We was in love. So that felt right. You said you and Jake done it plenty too, so you know what I mean.” 

Of course she did. “Sure. Then you and Eliza.”

“Yeah.” How he could fit so much shameful awkwardness into one little word was a marvel.

“That’s all there’s been for you?” Nobody at all since Eliza? Was that even possible? But then, she could understand the idea of shying away from it. He’d carried his share of guilt after that clearly enough, and even before that, he’d needed his heart to be in it for it to be worth his trouble. Given she could understand, it being the same for her, she’d done him no credit by immediately assuming as a man that randiness won out over everything else. Jake hadn’t been like that either, but they’d fallen in love young enough, and she’d been so ready to believe he was a remarkable exception. Trying to imagine it now, in the bed of some stranger she’d paid for it, how awkward and joyless it would be, she could see his way of thinking.

That blush intensified even further, if that was possible. “Me and Abigail almost...well, she asked. I thought it could be fine with a friend, even if I didn’t love her. I kissed her, that’s all. Realized I’d had too much to drink and there I was with some pretty dark-haired girl who wasn’t Mary, nine years older and no wiser, ready to make the same damn mistake all over again.” He raised an eyebrow, spread his hands, and shrugged. “So I let her fall asleep in my tent, went to go take my watch and sober up. We was friends after that, maybe even better for having gotten off that train before we both done something real stupid.” Abigail had referred to her own wild young days once in talking with Sadie, but she hadn’t mentioned Arthur as a part of them, so that fit. She did miss Abigail, and Karen, closest thing she’d had in that camp to sisters. At least Arthur still had Charles to write. 

Her heart hurt so much for Arthur right then, though. She’d put the pieces together wrong again, made foolish assumptions rather than seeing him truly. She hadn’t realized the world had been quite that forlorn for him. Seemed he'd done it at seventeen mostly because of fear of disappointing Dutch by failing to measure up to his expectations, as usual. Then the joy of young love and the utter heartbreak with Mary, one mistake with Eliza, and he'd completely run away from the whole business out of shame and guilt. She could barely fathom exactly how much he’d punished himself for it, denied himself all those years the ordinary things most people took for granted, that she’d taken for granted assuming he’d had in some way. Happiness, love, even simple pleasure. He’d been given so little, expected virtually nothing, and even then thought that was more than he deserved. Should have seen with how harshly he thought of himself, and how much guilt he carried, that he couldn’t allow himself even that much. It wasn’t the scars she’d thought, they’d instead been wounds bleeding heavily. They might still be, at that, and then last year he’d gotten yet another one. “Colm. That...don’t count, you know that?”

“Do you count them O’Driscolls?” he challenged her.

“I count them cheerfully dispatched to hell. What they done? No. There wasn’t nothing of my say-so in it.”

But it had left its mark all the same. More so on her than him, perhaps. She could see now it wasn’t that she was that weak. It was only that her ordeal had been longer, and she’d been luckier than him for so long, her life happy and comfortable, and so it hit her all the harder. His life had been one string of near unrelenting awfulness, so that cellar and Colm was just one more bad thing that had happened to him. It wasn’t a starkly drawn line between before and after like it was for her, just a slow continual slide into an increasing darkness that he accepted as his due. 

Though maybe sometimes he felt that same bleak despair as her at imagining the possibility that the last person to touch him like that in his entire life would have done it in violence. But at least she’d known the joy of it done in love too. He didn’t have even that for comfort. The respect of honesty was good, but there had to be some glimmer of hope, didn’t there? “Well, you ain’t wrong on one account. When there’s love in it, it’s....something real special.”

“Well, my dear Mrs. Adler, I shall take your word as an authority on that,” he said, with a certain mock solemnity. “Eight _years_ you waited, was it? I can’t much imagine how you didn’t die of frustration.”

She couldn’t help but be grateful that he’d managed that deft trick again of turning the conversation back to something brighter and funnier, just before it got unbearable. “Can’t tell you how many times I almost did.” She gave him a bit of a smile, raising an eyebrow. “And Jake wasn’t quite so much a preacher’s boy as you was imagining. That same day we decided we was leaving Tumbleweed, well, let’s say those next few weeks till the wedding, just about any time we wasn’t busy making plans, we was anticipating the wedding night.”

He burst out laughing at that, putting an arm along the back of his chair. “Good on him and you both.”

“Hey.” She leaned in, reaching out and covering his hand with hers where it still rested on the table. Somehow it meant even more now to do it, knowing that he’d allow her this so freely and without that tension of surprise, that being touched with kindness and affection by her had become something acceptably ordinary to him. “You listen to me a minute, all right? And don’t give me none of your crap about how this ain’t true. Cause it is. I don’t think I knew just how bad things was for you till now. And I wish the world was a lot kinder to you than it been. But for you to have that much goodness in you still, choose that when it mattered most, and keep choosing that even now--Dutch maybe made you think all them years you ain’t nothing without him, but you are. You found yourself, when things was so tough most folk would have given up. You’re one remarkable man.” 

He inhaled then, a sharp, quick breath. Held it a moment. “Thank you,” he said, voice gone low and rough, and of course he ducked his head in that shy way he had when being complimented, and she expected that. He surprised her again, because then he lifted his head, met her eyes, and for a moment there was something there she couldn’t quite identify, but then it was gone.

“And thanks. For...telling me about Benji. Letting me talk about Laura.” For letting her take out that piece of herself, dusty and thrown into hiding as it had been all those years. It fit a bit oddly still, claiming that, but it felt right for all that, rather than pretending and denying.

“Anytime. What’s a friend for?” He gave her a slight grin at that, and as usual, she sensed a flippant joke coming, but that was all right. “After all, we gotta talk about _something_ , and the Nuevo Paraisan weather? That don’t change all that much. Now, how about we clean up from dinner, we pay attention to Dido before she starts screaming about it, you get out them bounty posters, and we figure out tomorrow.”

She had to agree with that. “Losing fifty bucks today don’t seem that bad a price for believing in second chances, but we can get a few bounties in before that drive to MacFarlane’s in a couple weeks. I got some music lessons I can teach, but I suspect that’s gonna be more barter than coin.” They still helped teach English and reading at Las Hermanas a few times a week, but that was charity work, done happily in gratitude for what they did for Arthur and her. Even if they hadn’t been inclined, it wasn’t like they could offer that for hire when Las Hermanas did it for free. 

“Every bit helps. There’s night watch rotations here in Chuparosa, and Soledad mentioned he might need help with taming down some horses. Might be worth sniffing around Escalera when we drop off a bounty, see what’s maybe brewing there. See if little Miss Bonnie MacFarlane knows of anything, at that.” She couldn’t help but smile, seeing that same intense purposefulness she’d seen in him at camp, the methodical workhorse constantly searching out opportunities, assessing, judging, prioritizing, discarding if need be. Some things didn’t change, so much as they got fitted into their proper place in the new order of things.

Besides, Robledo’s warning that they were clueless about Mexico was on her mind, though she hoped to hell he was wrong. She and Arthur at least got a good start with the goodwill after rescuing those boys from the Del Lobos, even to the point of that pompous ass Padilla backing down. That had to be worth something. They’d make this life they were building work. Grabbing plates, she headed down the stairs, as usual not hearing him follow, but sensing he was there all the same.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Arthur to Rains Fall**  
Sir,  
I hope that this winter is proving kinder to you and your people given that you wasn’t left arriving in it and instead were better settled in. I know you for a busy man, so thank you for writing me last fall.

I am glad to hear the Canadians seem to look on the Wapiti with respect. That must be a welcome change given your dealings with the Army and it seems to me you all are due some peace. My own respite may have been forced on me to begin with the TB, and it came with its share of frustration. But I like to think that having seen the value in gentler times, it makes me a more patient man now and less prone to rash actions. You may credit yourself with getting some of that through my damn thick skull, as I have told you, but that philosophy has grown more in me since. It don’t hurt either that I am calling my own shots now, I suppose.

Things have changed here in an almighty hurry. To make the story short Sadie and me ended up chasing down some boys as was kidnapped by a gang we have seen become more trouble since we have arrived. I know you will understand that I saw it as a thing that had to be done, and I can’t say I am unhappy to have done that among the many things I ain’t proud to claim. Perhaps I never was proud to claim them, for all my pretending otherwise. 

Apparently managing that much proved me recovered enough to get set free from the TB ward, so we are now living nearby. The recovery is a slow thing still, and I am somewhat tethered like a horse so I ain’t wandering too far, as I have to be here every two weeks for continuing treatments until the doctor says otherwise, which will likely be several years. 

At that point I would like to come to Canada, if you are amenable to that. Charles is one of the only folk I have still kept in contact with from them days so it would be a fine thing to see him again, and to come pay my respects to you as well. I understand if the reminders of them days are too much pain for you and your people, however. 

Fond regards,  
Arthur Griffith

 **Letter from Arthur to Bonnie MacFarlane**  
Dear Miss MacFarlane,  
Thank you kindly for your letter as I received last year. I hope you will forgive my lack of response but it seemed I told you about that fella, you thanked me for it, and your invitation to drop in if me and my wife was ever up in Hennigan’s Stead seemed an end to the need for further conversation, even if a satisfyingly kind one. I ain’t one to continue to talk only to hear the sound of my own voice, or whatever the equivalent to that would be in terms of writing. If that was rude, then I can hope you will excuse it. 

Plus as much as you and me agree there are no designs at work on either of our parts, folk might gossip at a man and an unmarried woman who have no known association writing back and forth, right or wrong. I expect you know how post office clerks is. They get to know far too much of everyone’s business without even opening any of the mail. Not really a man who cares much on that with respect to myself, but truth be told, I can afford to say that. Like many things in this world, the brunt of scandal tends to fall mostly on a woman. It ain’t right and it ain’t fair, but that’s the way of it. 

But I am writing you now to say that Sadie and me are planning a trip into New Austin next month, in fact to your place. We have been hired on by Señor Padilla, foreman at Agave Viejo, as stockhands for a drive for some horses. If that invitation still stands, we are looking forward to meeting you and your father both.

Sincerely,  
Arthur Griffith


	16. Chuparosa I: Riders From The South

They’d left Chuparosa in the afternoon and gotten to Agave Viejo, rather than add several more hours of riding onto tomorrow’s toll, plus having that be in the dark by heading out before dawn. The owner, Pablo Jaramillo, was apparently away in Sonora checking out some cattle, but his wife, Miranda, and oldest son Carlos had fed them a hearty dinner in thanks for bringing back young Jorge. So it looked like they’d earned some goodwill there. Carlos looked at them, an anxiously earnest man of about thirty, and gestured towards the house. “Are you two sure you won’t stay inside tonight?”

Wryly, Arthur thought that his body might love it, given he’d gone a bit soft in a year of regularly sleeping in a bed now, but they couldn’t. “It’s real kind of you. But there’s no point starting the drive off by putting ourselves above the rest as special. Padilla’s already skeptical enough, and I’d rather earn that place.” He eyed Carlos, giving him a shrug. “I expect when you’re out riding stock drives, it’s no special treatment either.”

Carlos laughed at that. “Yeah, you’ve got the right of it there. Hilario’s a grump, but he does respect good workers, so I imagine you’ve got nothing to fear. But,” he took Arthur’s hand for a moment in a friendly handshake, “the Jaramillos do owe you, and your wife. We don’t forget that.” He gave a wry grin. “Even if we regret Jorge as a total idiot sometimes, he’s ours.”

“Dumbass little brothers are a blessing and a curse both,” he agreed, returning the smile. “Especially when you’re the oldest boy. Keeping the brothers in line, protecting the sisters. I know the way of it.” He’d lived that life for fourteen years to an increasingly large and rowdy family, ever since Dutch and Hosea brought John back to camp. No longer simply the son and prized protege, but now there were additional responsibilities that fell on his shoulders, and he’d taken them seriously. With that, he gave a quick wave farewell and headed out into the yard, where Sadie already waited. “Nice enough folk,” he said softly. “Some reason you had us sit down to dinner, though?” She’d accepted quickly, and he’d followed her lead. In this, she had the way of it better than him.

“Farm folk offer you a meal, it’s rude to decline. Besides, it’s gonna be a couple days at least before we get a good dinner. And I know how you get when you’re riding on a job. Forget to eat half the time.”

“That’s true.” Las Hermanas had probably been good for him there, getting him used to eating regularly.

“You need to keep that up,” she told him, voice firm but gentle all at once. “Do a better job looking after yourself with the eating and resting up and all. Don’t need you putting in all that work getting better only to get careless with it.”

“I know that.” The TB had only got at him because of it, so he’d have to do better. “But it’s easy to forget. Remind me if you gotta.”

Getting their bedrolls off Bob and Buell, they saw a campfire waiting near a chuck wagon, and two corrals of perhaps fifty horses waiting for the drive in the morning. Good, solid working horses mostly, the sort that could be sold in America for a better price and put to use up in West Elizabeth and New Hanover, probably bought from somewhere further south and perhaps a few mustangs rounded up in the desert and tamed to the harness or saddle. But there were two or three that he picked out as likely bound to be sold as fancy riding horses, including a particularly fine silver dapple Thoroughbred. “Gotta wonder who lost a poker bet for that one,” he nodded towards it.

Sadie chuckled, and they undid their bedrolls. One man was already there, blond and sunburnt, and he stared at Sadie, incredulous.

 _Oh, here we go._ Like clockwork, and their new friend piped up exactly as he expected, with the flat American accent of the plains. “This close to the border, bet you’re American. You folk speak English?”

“Just about as good as you, mister,” Sadie answered him dryly. “Which may not be saying much.”

“Lady, you’re in the wrong place.”

“Nope, I’m right where I’m supposed to be.” She sat down on her bedroll, casual as anything, but he could see the tense set of her shoulders, braced already to fight. “Here for the horse drive, same as you.”

“This ain’t--it ain’t _proper_!” he spluttered.

Sadie could handle it, true. But she shouldn’t have to, and her feeling the need for resignation that this was the way it was irritated him all the same. The thought of her having to do this over and over to get even a scrap of the deference he got instinctively was too much, and yeah, maybe it hit his temper, but there were fights worth fighting so someone else didn’t always have to do it. She’d done it for him in Beaver Hollow a few times. He’d seen it, standing up for him to the likes of Bill and Micah making fun of him being sick. It had wounded his pride then--or maybe wounded that sense of self that hung entirely on his capabilities, more accurately. Maybe even more so hear the snickers and jeers of _Arthur’s gotta get a woman to do his fighting now?_ He’d shoved it aside in favor of focusing on more important things, telling himself the insults stood as mere gnat bites against the monumental tasks still ahead. That didn’t mean they hadn’t still hurt, realizing how little there truly had been with some of those he’d counted as his family, that he had been a tool that once broken and useless he meant nothing to them. 

He’d found out who truly cared in about as painful a way as he could, and in the end, it was only pure luck that he was still here. John making it to Copperhead Landing, lifting that duty Arthur had charged Sadie with to look after Abigail and Jack. That left Sadie, the one person who cared and had nothing left, as broken and forlorn as him, the freedom to intend finding and burying him, and instead saving him. If he hadn’t sent Sadie and John away at all, if John had been later, or missed them at Copperhead Landing and caught up with them later in Rhodes, things could have been very different. 

But she’d fought for him even then, when he wouldn’t have counted himself worth the fight, especially then with as feeble and useless as he felt. Being honest with himself now, he hadn’t had the energy to take on those fights in addition to everything already on him as a burden, and hearing her care enough to fight for him felt good when he let himself have that small comfort. 

So he could return the favor. There was a way to do a thing that took the weight of it without offending someone’s capabilities. “If it ain’t proper, maybe the trouble’s with you. You really obsess about getting a poke anytime a woman is around to the point you can’t do your job?” He gestured towards his temple, making a corkscrew _loco_ gesture. “You might wanna go talk to one of them head doctors about that sickness, boy.”

That gaze swiveled his way, and Arthur could see the moment he read the threat, saw a big, intimidating man, and instinctively took that in. Like Sadie said, he could pretty much just show up and use that to his advantage. And he had. He’d turned quiet menace into a damn art form, which worked probably eight times out of ten. Mere threats, the thought of him having all that strength and temper under precise, icy control scared enough people shitless that there was no need to get to the point of strong-arm tactics. Right on cue, he tried to show his teeth, making a last desperate show. “Sure, the girl needs you to fight for her. Mister, ain’t nothing so sad as a man who’s led around by a woman’s--”

“See, you might want to quit right there before saying that word you’re probably thinking. I’m doing you a favor here, _amigo_.” He leaned in, smiling that overly cheerful smile that usually unsettled people in a context like this. “You’re irritating me. You’re insulting my wife and offending her mightily, I imagine. So in the interest of us all having a nice peaceful trip to Hennigan’s Stead and getting paid, I’m giving you one chance to rethink all this nonsense, shut your nasty mouth, and treat her with respect just like any other rider on this drive. If not? Hell, she don’t need me to fight for her. It’s your balls at stake here.” He leaned back on his bedroll, folding his arms, making himself the portrait of a man at ease. “I’ll just be sitting here laughing at your dumb ass while she rips them off.”

“I’d sooner shoot them off,” Sadie quipped. “I really don’t know where them parts of his have been.”

Satisfying as that remark was, he felt a flicker of anxiousness start within him. Too easy to push this too far into the point of an actual fight, and if so, that wouldn’t be favorable to anyone. This wasn’t the gang, where he’d climbed to that position of Dutch’s right hand man from years and years of hard work and loyalty, and where he could afford to casually throw his weight around to get people in line, because there was an actual expectation of him doing it and keeping the harmony in their family. Here? He and Sadie were just two ordinary folk no better than the rest, who Padilla had taken on somewhat reluctantly to begin, and any ruckus they caused would probably come back on them as troublemakers. 

He glanced over at Sadie, not wanting to take it out of her hands, but hoping that wild, angry streak of hers didn’t crop up and demand satisfaction too much right now. Padilla had made it obvious he’d probably blame any trouble on her. Sadie eyed the man across the fire, and breathed out in a slow, heavy sigh. “Señor Padilla hired me, fool. And he ain’t gonna want fistfights or shooting among his hands, so how about you don’t cost us all our jobs here? I ain’t here for nothing but the work, so treat me like any other rider and we’ll get along just fine.”

“Good enough,” came the awkward reply, but Arthur could hear the tinge of anger in it still. He suspected she kept a gun nearby her hand as she crawled into her bedroll all the same. He did too, at that, but that was the force of years of habit.

Padilla hadn’t been kidding about being ready to go. Dawn barely touched the eastern horizon across the border in Diez Coronas, painting the red rocks with soft shadowed colors, when they were up, stowing their things on horseback, eating a quick breakfast of tortillas, beans, and coffee, and hitting the saddle.

Besides himself, Sadie, and the other American--Frank Bryant--there was Padilla, and two Mexicans he introduced as Guillermo Torres and Tomas Medina. No chuck wagon driver needed, given Padilla’s outline of the plan. Get across the San Luis today if possible, make camp for the night. It would likely only be an overnight drive to MacFarlane’s Ranch if all went well, three days at the outside. They could carry the provisions for that horseback easily enough, and restock up in Hennigan’s Stead. Ride back with Padilla, or else take the train back, though he and Sadie were of a mind to poke around north of the border and see what jobs they might find. It had been nearly two years now since the debacle in Blackwater, and the papers made it clear the gang very definitely headed everywhere but New Austin, so perhaps the vigilance had relaxed enough that they could test the waters. 

Dutch apparently blowing up a damn oil well in western New Austin in December as a “to hell with you” to Cornwall Junior, and a farewell to America, probably set some folk on alert again, but if he and Sadie were cautious, it was still worth a look. Reading that article after Christmas when the news trickled down south, he’d felt his share of things. Furious and sad, mostly, that the chaos and showboating in Dutch truly had won out, that here was the man finally revealed, pulling some deadly violent stunt and playing games with another Cornwall, just to prove some stupid point. The news that apparently he’d hopped another boat in St. Denis too came with mingled anger and relief. Anger that Dutch would never answer for any of it, that he’d probably end up in Tahiti living his asinine dream, chasing a series of women who never got any older, while not giving a shit that he’d become a tornado that left so many broken and dead in his wake. But also profound relief that Arthur would never have to worry about facing the man again, never have to answer that question of what he would do, whether he could do what justice and honor said he probably should, what he likely should have done at Beaver Hollow or long before. 

Torres and Medina offered Sadie no direct trouble, though he saw their curious glances at her during the introductions. “We rotate backwards every two hours,” Padilla said, turning his horse, a big red roan quarter horse, towards the front of the herd, issuing his orders with confidence. “Bryant, you’re left opposite me, and we start in front. Torres, you’re left with Griffith on the right--the man, I mean. Medina, you’re left with the lady on the right, starting in the back.” He shot a look at Arthur as he passed, and Arthur understood it well enough. He’d had to learn to read men quickly over the years.

Padilla had made sure to separate him from Sadie, assuming he’d cover her ass. Plus he’d put her and Medina as the rear drivers to begin, critical enough at the start of the drive, assuming she’d screw up and look bad. Though he had sense enough to put Medina, who looked like a man who knew what the hell he was doing, with her, while assuming Arthur would be needed to balance out Torres, young and green. So Padilla wanted to put her in her place, but safely. He wouldn’t put that satisfaction above the integrity of getting the job done.

Considering his honest ranch and cowboy work amounted to maybe two or three weeks’ worth in his whole life, he wasn’t sure that was a great recommendation for his skills. That had been long ago too, the early ‘80s, obtained mainly while scoping out places for Hosea with an eye to a scam, and getting himself easily hired on temporarily as a big, strong man who could sit a horse and shovel shit. Though as Hosea pointed out, some driving and herding skills hadn’t hurt Arthur, when the opportunity for a little cattle rustling or horse theft presented itself as it all too often did out west. John had been too young for it then, but he, Hosea, and Dutch had done some decent livestock thieving work back in the day.

But once they successfully hit that first bank in 1887, in Colorado, they’d never looked back to the relatively small potatoes they’d been dealing in before. After that, it was all relentlessly forward, harder challenges and richer scores, banks and trains and armored stagecoach convoys, that sparkle in Dutch and Hosea’s eyes of finding their new limits, taking on more folks into the gang, bigger and loftier dreams and plans until finally like Icarus they flew too damn close to the sun.

Sometimes, through the ‘90’s, he’d thought how much he missed those days when it was just the six of them--well, six and whoever Dutch happened to have in his bed at the time, but poor woman, nobody ever paid her much mind because they knew she wouldn’t last long enough to truly be a part of things. Those had been the days when stealing a few horses, selling some fake mine shares, or relieving a stagecoach of rich folk of some of their valuables had been enough to keep them running for months. When they’d been a family, getting by and not asking all that much. Skimming only in small bits from those who would scarcely miss it, mixing it with some occasional honest work, rambling all over the west, living largely content with that lot. He wasn’t sure there ever had been truly “good old days” in a crooked life, but those were certainly far kinder and gentler than anything after the wildfire that caught and spread after that first bank job, then faster and faster after Bessie’s death, Hosea being drunk for damn near a year and looking for something else to fill the emptiness, and Dutch filling that void with his ever bigger dreams, until it was an unstoppable inferno by 1899 that consumed them all. If Mary and Eliza had been unsettled by who he was when they’d known him then, unwilling to truly accept and love a thief, they’d have hated the increasingly violent man he became later every bit as much as he had.

Chasing the heavy thoughts out of his head, he nodded across to Torres. Medina and Sadie headed for the back of the herd, and he couldn’t quit hide a small grin as he heard her shout, urging the horses on. No, she wasn’t going to be a shy, retiring little flower on this. She would boldly make them respect her, men and horses both, and damn if he didn’t admire her for it.

Admire, love, all of it. The feeling was still there, much as he’d managed to largely get it wrestled into its proper place in the weeks since Christmas. Chances were it would never entirely go away. But acknowledging he wasn’t a man made for all that, that it was far better to be content with the fact he’d apparently made a pretty good friend to her, helped. He called her his wife, anyway, and as he’d told her, his experiences with bedding women hadn’t been much that he couldn’t live without, as he’d proved. If the business was that overrated, it wasn’t worth any regret of not having it with her, and if they had pretty much everything else already between them and she was willing to stay with him, why should he want more than that? Outsized dreams, as Dutch and Hosea had proved, didn’t help in the end. 

Focusing on the horses helped, given especially for the first few hours, the skittish herd needed constant minding to soothe and guide them, settling them into a single entity. Cutting out abruptly to chase down would-be stragglers, guiding the flow of the herd around the rocks and canyons and slopes like a living river. Driving them in a slow and steady pace almost due north towards a ford of the San Luis across to a bend of the river called Turnagain Point, south of Lake Don Julio. He passed Sadie on their second rotation, galloping past her moving up to take point and heading towards the back of the herd himself, hearing her laugh and call for him to have fun eating dust for a couple of hours. Tugging up the green and black checked bandana, ready for that dust, he gave her a wave of acknowledgment at the joke. 

There that heavy ache was again, filling his chest. Near as bad as the nitrogen from the damn Cactus, though at least he could tell himself that was saving his life, whereas this pressure would do nothing of the sort. What was it in him that suddenly decided he wasn’t happy enough with what they already had? _You can live without what you’ve had before, sure. It wasn’t nothing worth it. But it’d be different with her, though. Even just as a friendly thing. You know it would be._

Probably, but what was the point of worrying about it? If she ever missed the feel of it enough and wanted him in her bed as a friend someday, then sure, he’d take that with astonishment and gratitude both. If not, then he was no worse off than he’d been for most of his life. Actually, he’d still come out far, far ahead already with the way things were. Not passionate romance, perhaps, but there was some kind of love there all the same, something steadfast and tested by all sorts of trials and woes already, and wasn’t that better in the end? If he got thirty more years and this was what he had, growing old and grey with a best friend who chose to stay and make a life of it with him, he couldn’t call that something to cause genuine discontent. He shouldn’t be like Dutch, always needing and demanding more. 

Honestly, the true worry was if she decided someday she _wasn’t_ done with romance, and God, he’d be happy to see her smile and laugh that brightly, and he would walk away like he had to and let her live her life. But the lucky bastard had best appreciate her. He hoped like hell he could stand to give up something in his life that had become that precious, because until her, he wouldn’t have known exactly what he had to lose. Though he’d gotten used to losing things. Maybe this shouldn’t be any different. 

Looking at the herd, he cursed himself, realizing his wandering mind, however brief, and Torres’ inexperience had caught them drifting back a bit, and the herd’s speed now lagged for it. Riding rear on a herding job was probably about the worst place to not pay attention. Looking over at Torres, seeing the awkwardness in him in not knowing quite how to fix it, he gestured to the back of the herd with a sharp shoving motion, telling him they needed to push them up. Spurring Buell in a bit closer, he gave a shout to smarten them up, get them moving a bit more briskly. Heard Torres do it over on the right flank too, swerving to catch a horse before it cut its way out besides, and Arthur gave him a nod of acknowledgment at a job well done. 

His own damn fault--he shouldn’t have been in his own head and left the kid following his lead by it, obviously desperately looking to him for cues. _Get your head out of your ass and focus. You wasn’t like this with the gang, cause daydreaming like this, it’s careless as anything. Knew it would probably get you killed, or worse, get folk who was riding with you killed. Maybe this is Padilla’s job, not yours, but you take this every bit as serious. Especially when you’ve got a kid to look after here._ The pressure eased again at that, things put back into their proper perspective again. He had a job to do, he and Sadie had something truly wonderful between them all the same, he was alive and relatively healthy and seeing new parts of Mexico from the back of a horse as fine as Buell, so all in all, things looked pretty good. No point being blue about a few small things he couldn’t have. “Don’t worry about it, kid, we got this,” he called across the herd. Couldn’t see for sure beneath the blue bandana Torres wore, but he could imagine that likely sudden grin all the same. 

They’d have to stop for the afternoon to let the herd graze, and to wait out the hottest part of the day anyway. There would be time to rest and eat them for them, and he’d need that himself. Best make some miles before then, though.

~~~~~~~~~

She hadn’t taken much notice of MacFarlane’s Ranch either heading north with Jake, or in the wee hours of a November morning with Arthur. In both cases, it was just a changeover point on a longer journey. Riding in with the herd in the last of the afternoon sun, she had to admire the place. A big, prosperous farm, smartly kept, to the point of being a major station for the region. Train station, stagecoach stop, its own general store, buildings still half finished to expand the place even further. Like Emerald Ranch had been before its decline, but MacFarlane’s spoke of bigger dreams yet, not fading into obscurity like Emerald.

Padilla paid them all off as the ranch hands from MacFarlane’s took over the herd, ready to put them to pasture for a few days and then load them on an east and north bound train. “You’ve all got enough daylight to make it back home tonight if you like,” he told them, nodding south. “Or else the train to Casa Madrugada will be coming through soon.”

“We’ll be sticking around up here a bit,” Arthur answered him. “Personal business.”

Padilla shrugged at that. “Fair enough.” He complimented Arthur next. “I seen you handling things during breaks, and with the herd. Seems you have a talent for managing men.”

She saw the wry smile on Arthur’s face at that. “Might have handled it a time or two.” He certainly had, being Dutch’s right hand as he had.

He nodded to her next, which surprised her. “Good work. Thought Medina would have to prop you up, but you handled your own. You rode with a herd before.”

“I grew up farming near Tumbleweed.” That meant running cows and horses often enough. She wouldn’t deny the hot frisson of satisfaction at forcing him to acknowledge her, admit that he’d been wrong.

“You two living in Chuparosa?” Sadie nodded in reply to that. “Good. I’ll send you word if there’s more work. Got some more drives coming up. Mostly short stints up here, out to El Matadero, and the like. The rail cut the need for the old thousand-mile drives. Can’t say my wife or me miss my being out on the trail for months.” He clapped his gloved hands together, giving them a genuine smile beneath that broad mustache. “Now, if you’ll excuse me, I got a bottle of tequila and some catching up for Andy Docherty. We foremen gotta talk business, after all.” He ambled off towards the tall foreman of MacFarlane’s overseeing the last of the work, and Docherty clapped him on the back, obviously greeting an old friend.

Sadie shook her head, unable to help a reluctant smile. “So he’s a crusty old coot, but I guess he ain’t so bad.”

“Good thing I didn’t knock his teeth in at Christmas?” Arthur asked dryly.

“Considering it’s payday and we impressed him, yeah.” She nudged his hip with hers as she passed, laughing. “Wouldn’t have minded you punching out Bryant, but I do appreciate you leaving that to me.”

He let out that low, amused little scoff of his. “I know you can handle it.” True. He’d left that to her as capable in her own right, but deftly enough he’d stepped in also to help shut the idiot up. She appreciated that.

Eyeing the house with its large porch, she glanced at Arthur. “Well, fine company we make. We look like we just got done with a day and a half driving horses.” Dusty, sweaty, rumpled, and all of it.

“Just about. Guess we could see about cleaning up--”

“You two the Griffiths? The ones who wrote Bonnie about Nate?” She turned to see a man lumbering towards them from the stable, broad and solid and silvered, reminding her of a grizzly wakened from his nap. Fifty or so, aged but still strong and vital. 

“Yes, sir.”

“Drew MacFarlane.” He offered his hand. “Welcome to the ranch. Leave your horses, and they’ll be handled. I reckon you two want to come and get cleaned up a bit after the drive. Dinner’s in an hour.”

Practically marched up to the house, shown to a room upstairs, she turned to Arthur. “Nice place they got here.”

She saw a sudden wicked gleam in those eyes of his. “Hosea would be beside himself. My Lord. Two years ago, give me twenty minutes in the dead of night and all these folk asleep, I’d clean the place out.” Then he shook his head, look turning to embarrassment. “I don’t mean I’d have done it. Robbing folk when you was taken in as a guest, notion never quite sat right--”

“You don’t gotta explain.” She wasn’t going to take a snap at him for joking about the old days. As if she didn’t know the weight of regret in him at all of it. Seemed to her that him occasionally showing a bit of flippant humor was a healthier thing than using it as a rod to beat himself with endlessly. “Don’t steal the china. Expensive as hell, but fragile as anything, so it ain’t like you can sell it easy.” 

She unbuttoned her shirt hastily, unfastening the cotton band around her breasts and then pulling off her sweat-damp camisole. Reached for the washcloth and cake of soap, eager to scrub off the worst of the dust. 

She heard him rummaging in his saddlebags, presumably for a clean undershirt and shirt himself, ready to scrub up himself. “Never saw the point in something that breaks so easy. China’s like furniture, I guess. Just one of them things you can have when you settle down.”

The few pieces of her mother’s china she’d had left that survived the long trip got destroyed up in the cabin. She wouldn’t mention it, knowing he’d grab hold of that guilt and clutch it all the tighter. “It’s something you have only when you have guests too. I had no use for a thing like that up in Ambarino, really.” Washed up decently enough for dinner at least, she shrugged on a clean camisole, tucking it into her pants, and kept dressing from there, then combing out and braiding her hair again as best she could. “Didn’t have no use for a lot of things. You saw how small the place was. Even fitting a hip bath in on Sundays was no easy thing. Guess we don’t have much room for it in Chuparosa neither. Easier to pay the Gonzaleses for a bath like we do now, really.”

“Well, they cost, but there’s something to be said for a hotel bath anyway. Full size tub and all, the water’s good and hot--” She swore he let out a soft sigh of something almost like pleasure at that, and couldn’t help but smile, oddly touched by it. 

“Why, I didn’t know you was the type for relaxing in a bath. Ain’t you quite the hedonist,” she teased him, glancing over her shoulder, seeing him finishing buttoning his own shirt. 

“You try being big as me and jamming yourself in a hip bath, or cleaning up in a cold creek,” he retorted, the gleam of humor returning to his eyes. 

“I ain’t making fun, Arthur,” she said, holding up a hand. “Hell, it’s good to hear you let yourself enjoy _something_.” God knew he’d allowed himself almost nothing. Though there had been compensations for jamming herself into that tiny hip bath. Scrubbing each other’s backs, talking and laughing while they each took their baths, Jake helping make sure she got all the soap out of her hair. Trimming his hair for him, his beard too sometimes since that tiny mirror wasn’t much help unless he wanted to shave everything off. Rubbing his shoulders after a long, rough day of work. Maybe she ought to try that after dinner. She could claim self-interest, which would help Arthur with the idea, given her own shoulders could use some of the knots worked out, if he was was willing to trade, she would bet those big, deft hands of his could work some magic.

As was, time to head downstairs. In the dining room, Drew took the chair at the head of the table, and she saw the empty chair at the foot, guessing that a departed wife still held her place there. Chairs for two guests filled up the table more, but it looked as though it had once held more than the four MacFarlanes who sat there now: Drew, a young blond woman in her early twenties who must have been Bonnie, and two coltish boys still in the gangly throes of their late teens.

“My sons, Gus and Ethan,” Drew introduced the boys, “and I suppose you guessed this is Bonnie.”

Greetings exchanged all around, the meal begun, she saw Bonnie watching the two of them with almost unabashed curiosity. “Fine biscuits,” she said, savoring the flaky texture of them, how they practically melted in her mouth. “I ain’t had a good one in a quite a while.” It was something her own mother never much got the hang of, and so neither had she. “Ain’t had butter this fresh neither, at that.” Probably from the ranch’s own cows, and she and Jake lost Missy that last winter. They’d eaten the sudden supply of beef gratefully enough--couldn’t afford to be sentimental about it--but the milk and butter had been sorely missed by May. 

“Mine,” Bonnie said with a bit of a grin. “Could get you the recipe if you’d like.” 

Drew wasted no time diving right in, while Ethan and Gus ate with the ravenous appetite only boys of that age seemed to manage. “It was a kindness for you to write about Nate Hays. What happened?”

“We was up in New Hanover in the summer of ’99, the Heartlands.”

“Right, and you’re down in Mexico now? Pair of rovers, ain’t you two?” There was no accusation in Drew’s tone, only curiosity, but Sadie found her heart beating a little faster at that all the same. Things could unravel too easily if the wrong thread got pulled here.

Arthur’s tone stayed decidedly casual. “I’m afraid I always been a bit of a rambler. Tried to settle down a few times, but bad luck always seemed to send me on the road again to keep making my way. Hoping to make something stick this time. But yeah, we was near Flat Iron Lake, and I guess Mr. Hays got himself caught in one hell of a bad storm in his boat. Would have written you sooner, as I said, but things as was, slipped my mind until we was heading through here on the way to Mexico.”

“You was headed to Mexico for work?”

“No.” Arthur’s gaze flicked up, met Drew’s. “TB. I was bad off. So Sadie said Mexico sounded like a good place to go.” He held up a hand, obviously anticipating the nervousness. “I’m healed up. Ain’t contagious or nothing.”

“Lost a son to TB,” Drew answered him. “Hank. He was only 12.” He glanced away, mouth working into a tight line against the obvious emotion of it. “Anyone who beats that lousy bastard of a disease, you have my admiration.”

“Bad business, watching someone you love suffering like that,” Sadie said softly. Watching Arthur struggle so fiercely and slowly lose ground had been hard enough, and the fragile, tense months early on in Nuevo Paraiso where it could easily have gone either way, life or death. But watching a son or daughter die of TB far before they grew up had to be its own particular hell. She supposed now they had been lucky that Sarah was about the youngest who had been at Las Hermanas with TB that whole time, because watching any little boy or girl slowly dying would have been even worse.

“Ain’t no easy thing to lose a child,” Arthur agreed quietly, and she saw the sympathy in his eyes as he looked at Drew. “I’m sorry to hear it, sir.” He would know, after all. He’d buried a son himself.

“Four,” Bonnie replied, looking between her and Arthur. “Daddy’s lost four boys. Hank, then Owen and Momma in ‘96, Cole in ‘99, and now Pat--”

“Pat ain’t dead--”

“Well he might as well be!” Bonnie snapped, dropping her fork, eyes snapping with rage. “He went and said he was done with all this.”

“He might still come back,” Drew growled at her, his tone wounded.

“Daddy,” Bonnie said, shaking her head with a sigh. “He ain’t. He’s gonna be some fancy-ass New Yorker and that’s that.” She was reminded so damn much of herself and Caroline, the rage and love and pain at that feeling of abandonment, the weight of responsibility left by that void. She’d guess Bonnie and this Pat had been close before all that.

She noticed Ethan and Gus shoveling food into their mouths even faster, clearing their plates almost by magic. “We’re gonna get to our chores,” Gus said--or was it Ethan? They beat a hasty exit.

Drew stared at the door for a few long seconds after they went, then turned back to the table, hand to his head for a moment. “They’re my last boys left here, them two, and I love them dearly. But my God, unless Pat does come back, Bonnie here is sure as shit gonna need to be in charge when I’m gone, cause I ain’t sure they got a brain between them,” he said with a low, tired sigh. “I’m sorry. The hospitality here hasn’t been what it should since my Annie passed.”

“You been left mourning over and over for years, by the sound of it,” Sadie told him. “That’ll take its toll. Besides, I’d rather folk be honest.”

“I’d best get about the chores too,” Bonnie said, pushing back her own chair. “Making sure Gus and Ethan don’t screw things up neither, with so many new horses settling in for a few days.” She rolled her eyes, smiling as she did it. “One of them idiots takes a notion to shoot a rifle near the horse paddocks and we’re gonna be chasing horses and mending fences, sure enough.”

Drew chuckled at that, waving her off. Once she left, he looked at Sadie. “She likes you, I’d say.”

“Does she now?”

He laughed, sitting back in her chair. “Sure. I think you’re what she’d love to be, truth be told. A woman riding herd with the men, taking no shit, obviously out having adventures. She takes this ranch seriously, but with Pat gone--she ain’t wrong.” His tone turned serious. “She hasn’t had a woman around much since her momma passed. And not one she sees herself in, I’d guess. I…” He hesitated, cleared his throat. “I’m sure you got business to attend to. Maybe kids you gotta get back to in Nuevo Paraiso, and all. But…if you’d be able and inclined to stay a few more days, it’d be welcome.”

She met his eyes, a bit surprised, but touched all the same. Gruff and tough, and he’d have to be to carve out a ranch in these New Austin lands when it had been all wilderness, but the love for his daughter shone there clearly all the same. “Arthur?” she asked. “I think we can stay a few days, you agree?”

“Just about,” he agreed. “But I’d rather lend a hand around--”

“You’re my guests, it ain’t expected that you work while you’re here.”

“Truth be told, my husband don’t know how to relax,” she told Drew dryly. “I suppose I don’t much either.”

“Fine. You’re welcome to help out, but I’m paying you fair wages for work you do, and that’s that. Deal?”

“Deal.” They could use the money, and it was one thing to have this fortunate quirk where Drew MacFarlane seemed inclined to like them, but seeing they were good workers would help too.

“We’ll have to leave before the week is out. We was gonna head west a bit, see if maybe some bounty posters is up.”

“Bounty man, huh?”

“We ride together,” Arthur said, gesturing to her.

“Heard there’s some rough stuff out west, out Armadillo and Tumbleweed way. Some gang called the Del Lobos.”

“We’re familiar,” Sadie told him with a bit of a smirk. “They’re worse in Nuevo Paraiso. Put a few of them in the ground, sure enough.”

“Pretty quiet out here in Hennigan’s Stead as yet, though Thieves’ Landing to the east is turning rotten with the local scum holing up there with Blackwater cleaning up its act. They got real rough on things after that whole massacre with the ferry in ‘99.”

“Hell of a thing,” Arthur answered. “Miss MacFarlane--Bonnie, I mean--she mentioned one of your boys died that year. It wasn’t...that business in Blackwater that done it?” She could sense the sudden tension gathering in him. If one of the MacFarlane boys had died on that ferry, of course Arthur couldn’t stay, couldn’t bear the guilt.

“No. Cole was my oldest. Twenty-two then. He was up in Valentine overseeing some sales. Got drunk, took the challenge of some equally drunk fool, and that was that. Got shot in the head right there in the street. Sheriff hanged the man who done it, but that’s poor comfort.” Drew sighed, running a hand through his thick greying hair. “Pat wasn’t ready for stepping into them shoes, always wanted something different. Anyhow. I won’t trouble you further with all that. You, uh, want a smoke for after dinner, Mr. Griffith?”

“Appreciate the kindness, but I gave up smoking.” Arthur tapped his chest. “The lungs. Doctor’s orders.”

“Ah. That’d do it.” He glanced at Sadie, almost boyishly shy now, which made an interesting mixture with that gruff charm. “Uh, missus?”

She smiled, touched by the courtesy of the offer in spite of herself. He might not know exactly what to do with a woman wearing pants and herding horses, whether she’d smoke or not, but clearly he was game to figure it out on Bonnie’s behalf. “Gave it up when he did, I’m afraid. And call me Sadie, won’t you.”

Not ready to sleep just yet, they ended up going for a walk around the place, seeing the sights of it even by lantern light. Leaning on the fence of the horse paddock, watching that gorgeous silver dapple running her paces, she felt Arthur there next to her. “They’re nice folk.”

“They seem it. Though I gotta come up with some better answers to what I been doing all this time. Folk are right to be suspicious of a man near forty who don’t got anything to say about his past.” He let out a slow, chagrined laugh. “All these years I been a man with only one boss, sad to say. And so much of that time he’d have said I was the best man he had. Loyal. Reliable. Capable. Don’t much think I’d get a good reference from him now, even if I could use it.” 

“You’ll get other bosses to speak for you in time. Padilla, for one. For now? Tell them you had a small farm and it didn’t work out, and that sent you on the road hunting bounties. That’s about all they need to know.”

“That ain’t stealing a story from Jake?” he asked carefully.

Touched by the consideration, she still shook her head with a tired laugh of her own. “Ain’t like me and Jake are the only farmers whose dreams failed and who got bought out. It’s common as dirt.”

“Sure. Plenty of disappointed folk in America while them rich vultures swoop in to come pick the bones. I just wanted to...ask.”

He took such pains to not cross lines, so careful in this almost-marriage of theirs what she might still insist was something that belonged to Jake. Sometimes she wished she could just set down that whole burden, because the longer things went, the more it felt like a shifting morass, all confusion of what she owed Jake yet, and what she could fairly separate out as her own. Wanting to figure it out because this in-between place hurt, but she couldn’t simply abandon Jake either.

“She was curious as anything, you know. Bonnie MacFarlane. Seen her looking at you, and I think if she’d got you alone she’d be about busting at the seams with questions. Me, I ain’t nothing in particular here. Just a man who wrote her a letter and did her a courtesy, and dusty cowboys riding in and out of this ranch, well, they’re a dime a dozen, sure. You? You’re something special. Woman who rides a horse, totes a gun, and don’t take no crap from anyone. I think Miss Bonnie found herself an idol.” 

She smiled in spite of herself. “She’s a real live one.”

“But?” He prompted her. “I heard it. You got one in there somewhere.”

Trying to speak the words without sounding like a jealous old shrew took some care. “She’s lucky. She’s what, twenty-two or so? Gonna probably inherit this place and end up running it, to hear Drew tell it. This is one hell of a ranch. She had some romantic foolishness with that Nate, sure, but she was young. She finds the man she loves, she ain’t gonna have no trouble marrying him. No waiting for the money to be there.”

“So you don’t like her.”

“It ain’t that. I do. I do like her. I don’t hate her for her luck, it ain’t her fault. And God knows even with all that she’s gonna have to fight for her place in this world anyway. It’s just...she’s young. She’s shining real bright. She’s lucky. And me, I’m…she makes me feel...”

Old. Broken. Tired. Poor. Near thirty-three now and with dreams guttered out like a distant dying star. She’d never felt it so keenly as she did now, seeing that girl who could have been herself ten years ago, and aching suddenly for all that it felt like she’d never have in her life. “I didn’t think my life would be like this when I was that young, you know?”

“I reckon neither of us did, when we was that young.” The sadness in his voice touched her, but it was in a good way, that shared fellow-feeling, letting her know she wasn’t alone. “But it wasn’t Bonnie MacFarlane as rode beside me when the world was going to shit. Who fought to save all them folk. Who come back and got me down from a mountain nearly dead as I was, and then got me safe all the way to Mexico. Who lost everything she had and still has a heart that Goddamn big. Maybe she’ll become something like that. But you _are_ that. She wants to be you, cause you’re one truly fine woman.”

Something twisted in her heart painfully at that, and she looked up to see him watching her carefully, as if hoping she was somehow all right. “You’re my friend, all right?” he said, giving her a slight nod. “And I couldn’t ask for one better.” 

“Thanks, Arthur.” She cleared her throat, taking the chance to try to put herself all back together. “I...sure, the girl could probably use a friend. Especially if she’s got only idiot brothers and awkward cowboys to talk to, right?” She could use one herself, given she’d lost both Karen and Abigail, and she had friends back in Nuevo Paraiso, true, but none quite like the outlaw women.

His tone brightened back to its usual humor. “That’s the spirit. God help me if I somehow piss off the both of you.”

“So we spend a few days here, then head out. We got, what, ten days before you gotta go see _El Cactus_ again?”

“Yeah. Do you want to go to Tumbleweed, or pass it by?” He asked it bluntly enough.

She thought about it a while. “I…” She was of two minds on that. There was nothing left in Tumbleweed but graves and memories, and now more ruined dreams, but on the other hand, she couldn’t avoid that forever. “I should at least go and visit my folks’ graves. Jake’s too. I...I owe them that.” Maybe that would help bring at least a little more peace, given she’d left Tumbleweed in such turmoil, guilt and joy all at once. She warmed more to the idea the further she considered it.

“All right. We got to Tumbleweed first, then we circle back to Armadillo, then head home to Chuparosa. Make a nice peaceful first visit back to America without shooting folk or getting shot at, earning some money, and making some friends. Which, considering the way we left the country a year ago, looks like things have changed, and for the better.” He pushed off from the fence. “Now how about we get some sleep?”

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Caroline to Sadie**  
Sadie,  
I got to say your letter was one big surprise after so long in silence. I wasn’t sure whether you had died or disappeared on me. I cannot say it’s not without some anger to find it the latter but not much thinking was needed to realize that I would far rather that than you have died.

I am so sorry to hear of what they done to Jake. Of all people I know how much you loved him. Not fair that you waited all them years for each other and then to have him taken from you like that. We have run into our share of outlaws here in Washington and Oregon over the years, taking supplies out to the mining camps as we been. Not often personally run into them, that is, though the couple times we did the bastards got a bullet for their troubles. But we seen the effects all the same. O’Driscoll Boys mostly, real nasty pieces of work. They moved east quick enough like some Godawful wildfire that blazed through this territory and then burned out leaving only a whole heap of ashes. But even the outlaw business seems to be drying up so things are more peaceful again.

I do regret how we parted though. After Daddy and Henry dying things was hard enough, and I left you (and Jake) holding all of that. There wasn’t no other way out that I could see but to leave, but I ran as far as I could so that it couldn’t never catch me. And I suppose I can admit you wasn’t wrong that Harold and me barely knew each other. I ain’t like you in needing to know a man so long before feeling some spark for him, but I did hurry too much. Them first years was hard as we both realized we had made some hasty decisions all caught up in a silly dream. But here we are still, and found our way through all that and found much to admire in each other, so we have become happy in the end. But of course I wasn’t going to say there had been a single moment of doubt in me, given you and me was both determined to be acknowledged as right. Pair of hardheaded Griffiths for sure. 

It was wrong of me to accuse you of hating Harold for his being Jewish, I admit that. But it seems both you and me was not at our best in ‘96. I expect we both was boiling over with frustrations and it showed in our letters. I hope we can do better now.

Do I want to know why you are going by “Griffith” again or as I suspect, are we perhaps better just saying it’s a done thing and me not knowing what come about to inspire that? I expect it ain’t just distance from Jake’s dying that done it. You keep your secret on that if you like, or tell me if it suits you better. Whatever you done to get by, that’s the past. Just praying it ain’t nothing that will get you hanged or the like. 

You have another nephew. Robbie will be three this coming May. Enclosed is a picture we took of all of us in December. Seems that was lucky timing given your letter arrived not a week later which was a fine start to 1901.

You write some pretty warm words about this good friend of yours. He sounds like a fine man. Write me again if you would.

Your loving sister,  
Caroline 

(Enclosed: **Picture of Caroline, Harold, and their three kids** )


	17. Chuparosa I: Dust In The Wind

Sadie had the feeling someone like Bonnie MacFarlane, opinionated as she was, wouldn’t be the shy wallflower to hold back. She hadn’t exactly been that in her early twenties either. So she went about things the next day, helping the ranch hands, waiting for the younger woman to make the move if it was to be made. There was something comfortably familiar in going about those chores, even if she hadn’t done them in near two years now, and on a much smaller scale both out in Gaptooth Ridge and up in the Grizzlies. For a little while it felt like things hadn’t changed. Maybe she wanted to believe, if only for a minute, that she hadn’t changed, but that feeling passed. She’d become different. Still a struggle some days to not automatically think different was entirely worse, but she was doing her best to make peace with the idea that even if she were to drop everything and start living a farmer’s life as a farmer’s wife--even if it that “wife” business wasn’t all real, it still mattered a hell of a lot--time wouldn’t seamlessly stitch back up to before. It had happened, all of it, and for better or worse, the Sadie Griffith she was now was different from Sadie Adler.

Though sometimes it both amused her and gave her a headache to try to wrap her mind around the notion of having come all the way back to being Sadie Griffith again, but then, she wasn’t going to fuss about it. Men didn’t have to worry about that. They could change a hell of a lot of things without changing their names, so in the end, it didn’t imply anything that her instinctive and rushed white lie all the way back in Valentine had carried over this long. It didn’t imply that she’d cut the last five years out of her life, including her marriage to Jake. 

She ended up milking cows with Bonnie, and suspected the girl had engineered that piece of business, but she bided her time. It took a while, until they were nearly done, but she hid a small, victorious smile when Bonnie spoke up. “Thank you for sticking around.”

“Oh, no trouble. Especially,” she made sure the joke was clear from her tone, “since your daddy insists on paying us.”

“Well, you was insistent on working, so that’s only fair.”

“We appreciated the offer, but we wasn’t going to impose without offering you nothing. Arthur wrote you about your suitor, and I’m real sorry about that. But that’s courtesy. Wasn’t nothing for you to open your home to us for days on end.”

Bonnie finished up her milking, by the sound of it. “Can I tell you something?”

Lord, she remembered those days herself. The need for someone to confide in, especially after Caroline left and there was nobody, no sister, most of her friends either gone from Tumbleweed or busy with their husbands and babies. How much it hurt letting her troubles just keep brewing to a poison within her, because some things she couldn’t share with Jake, much as he was her best friend, her fiance. Some things women needed another woman there to share with, and this girl, feisty as she was, fighting the world as Sadie had been, had no mother, no sister, no close women friends nearby by the look of it. She glanced over at Bonnie, sitting there at the next cow over, half-turned towards Sadie with a faintly anxious expression. “I know how it is without having someone to tell things to, when you need that. Sure.”

“Don’t tell nobody. Daddy still don’t like me talking about it. Worries it’ll bring me trouble. But he wasn’t my suitor. He…” She cleared her throat, voice a little unsteady. “He was my husband, Nate. We…after Momma died, things was hard. Real hard. And I was stupid and lonely and so Nate and me run off to Blackwater. Not for good, mind? Just to get hitched. We come back and, well, took only about a week to see how bad a mistake I’d made. I fell for his dreams thinking they was gonna be these fairy tales I lived in.” She made a rueful face, brushing a stray lock of hair off her forehead with the back of her hand.

Sadie nodded, finishing the milking and turning on her stool to face Bonnie fully. “We was all young and naive, you know. Thinking love’s all fairy tales. Real love, that’s mostly hard work. Especially when you’re farm folk. Gotta find a man who’ll stick with you through anything.”

“My folks had that.”

“Mine too.”

“I think I just wanted…”

“Ain’t no shame in wanting to be loved,” she told Bonnie gently as she could. “Especially when you’re hurting. That’s about the most human thing there is.” 

“We got a divorce. Or maybe an annulment. I honestly ain’t sure which. It’s all legal mumbo-jumbo. Made sure it got kept real quiet. That’s why Daddy don’t talk about it.” She chewed her lip for a moment. “The scandal, you know?”

“Sure.” A young woman eloping and then almost immediately dissolving that marriage would be doubly scandalous. Knowing the marriage had unraveled rather than been ended by death, and that Bonnie almost certainly had gone to bed with her husband, she’d be considered ruined. Seeing Drew’s love for her, of course he’d have tried to keep that hidden. It would have shocked some sense into her too, given that sober gravity Sadie now sensed was there. She must really need someone to talk to, given she was telling this to a virtual stranger.

“Nate didn’t take to it well. Said he’d go make his fortune and prove himself to me and Daddy. He didn’t understand that wasn’t the trouble.”

“If he was bound to go get himself killed trying to do some damn fool thing to impress you, when it wasn’t gonna do nothing anyhow, that really ain’t on you.” 

She saw the slight easing of Bonnie’s shoulders, as if she’d needed to hear that. “I try to tell myself that, just about. But still...he was a good man, Nate, even if we wasn’t meant to be. I just wish he’d let it go.”

“You lost enough brothers to know that sometimes shit happens to them you care about that ain’t deserved. I lost an older brother myself when I wasn’t much younger than you, got thrown from a horse. Lost a husband, killed by some pretty nasty bandits. Lost friends to everything from snakebite to the drink. Nearly lost Arthur to the TB. It’s a hard life. But New Austin is a hard land. It makes for tough folk. You can bear it, I expect.”

“Yeah, both you and your husband sound like you was from New Austin. Him a bit less so, though. Got some other sounds to that accent of his.”

“He spent a few years near Armadillo as a kid. Grew up moving around a lot after that, though. Me, I was out in Tumbleweed from when I was a baby till just a few years back.” 

“Hard town, Tumbleweed.”

“It was. That’s why we left.”

“You mean you and your husband?”

“Me and my first husband, yeah.” Maybe she ought to be careful what she said, and not say too much, though. In some ways she wished she could repay the honesty from Bonnie with her own secrets, but some of them were ones that could get Arthur hanged in the wrong hands, or her too. She couldn’t risk that. She couldn’t help a faint smile. “Run off to Blackwater to get married, we did. I...lost him, in the end, but we was luckier than you and Nate.” 

“You been lucky in love, looks like. Or smarter than me, sure. Don’t know what your first husband was like, but sound like he made you real happy. And Mr. Griffith--Arthur, I mean--clear as day you’re partners. The way things is between you two. I ain’t never seen a woman riding a horse drive before. And I know Hilario Padilla ain’t the sort to welcome it.”

“Ha, that took some twisting his arm from Arthur to get me a shot, but he done it. Him and me, we make a good team,” she had to agree. “Was the same with Jake--my first husband. He respected me. That’s the key, you know? You ain’t no blushing girl. So you need a man who treats you as a partner, not as a princess he’s gotta steal away from all this,” she waved a hand, indicating the cows, and the ranch in general.

“That was the thing. Nate thought that was what I wanted.”

“Then if he wouldn’t hear _you_ , wasn’t much of a marriage.” She suddenly had a pang of sympathy. Suddenly Bonnie reminded Sadie a bit of Arthur--all she’d had of love, of sex, was youthful folly, bitter disappointment, and guilty secrets, and nothing of the delight and hope. “Don’t mean things won’t get better. You’re young still.”

“Ain’t easy to meet men all the way out here,” Bonnie said wryly. “Besides, with Daddy probably having to put me in charge, means I gotta wonder if any man’s only out to get the farm. Or at least what he thinks he’s getting.”

“What you mean by that?”

“The farm’s doing all right. Place like this, though, don’t run itself. We get by, get ahead, but the debt’s there all the same.”

Sadie sucked in a deep breath at that. She’d misjudged it, seeing only a prosperous-seeming farm. “Playing with fire, there. I lost my folks’ farm to the bank.”

“It would kill Daddy to lose this place.”

“You mind if I tell you something? From someone who’s been there?” Bonnie nodded at that, gesturing for her to go on. “I was like you when I was--how old are you anyhow?”

“Twenty-three.”

“Yeah. Exactly like you. Determined to keep the farm. Cut my younger sister out when she up and left. Pretended she was pretty much dead to me. Don’t live for your daddy’s dreams if they ain’t yours. You can love your folks without tying your whole life to the choices they made, all right? I hung onto that farm far too long. Lost too many years and too many of my own dreams by it.”

She saw the flash of temper in Bonnie’s eyes for a moment, and realized perhaps she’d misjudged. “This ain’t like--” She paused, calmed herself. “It ain’t quite like that. I ain’t here because it’s the dream my folks built. I love this land. I love this ranch, and its folk.” She reached out, putting a hand on the cow’s side. “It’s the place I want to stay, for always.”

She could hear that sense of wonder and love in Bonnie’s voice that she knew had never been there in her own, only the gritty determination to not lose. “So it’s your dream too. Then that’s a different horse entirely. That’s worth the fight. But your brother--I finally wrote my sister at Christmas. She wrote me back, just before Arthur and me left for the horse drive. We’ve both grown up and come around. No point losing what family you have left for pride.” Getting Caroline’s letter had been a thing that kindled definite joy in her. So there was one thing from back then that she hadn’t lost, hadn’t destroyed with her foolishness. Maybe they’d never be terribly close, especially given the distance between them, but knowing the love between them hadn’t rotted away to nothing helped heal a wound she hadn’t even deigned to acknowledge all this time.

“I’ll take your advice on that. We’ll see what New York makes of Pat.” She made a wry grimacing face. “Though any man who’s willing to trade open sky and the saddle for sooty air and celluloid collars--I wish Pat the best, but I gotta say I can’t understand him none. Expect I never shall.”

“He’s got his dreams. You got yours. Don’t make neither of you wrong. Don’t mean you gotta understand him to hopefully love him still.”

“That’s fair.” She nodded towards the milk pails. “Let’s get this finished up, if you don’t mind.”

“Not a bit.” 

Bonnie gave her a bright smile as she grabbed her bucket. “Thanks. It’s real nice to have someone to talk to.”

There was a moment she wished she and Arthur could stay even longer, because that part of her that missed Caroline, missed Abigail and Karen, could stand to have that ache soothed by someone like this, someone she could so easily care for and come to see as a younger sister. But they had their own lives and dreams to find still, didn’t they? “Well, then you’d better write me regular enough down in Chuparosa.” She grinned, heading for the milk canisters. “That’s gonna be better than Arthur worrying that things is looking strange, him writing to an unmarried young woman such as yourself.” 

He’d asked her about that a few weeks ago, citing his in usual awkwardly boyish way when it came to notions of any kind of society, _I don’t want to cause no trouble for this girl, Sadie. Outlaw life is one hell of a charm school on some things, but it sure don’t give you much notion of proper etiquette._

Heading out from the barn, they paused at the horse pasture, seeing the men at work gentling some of the horses left. She smiled to herself, leaning on the fence, seeing Arthur at work with that silver dapple, who’d proved nervous. Approaching carefully, with soft words and slow steps, eyes on her at all times. He was still a good five feet away, and she couldn’t hear exactly what he was saying, but she could imagine, from that slight, reassuring smile on his face.

“He’s a good man with a horse, your husband,” Bonnie said, standing there by her side, eyeing the whole business. “Most ranch hands would have just roped her and hopped on.”

She rolled her eyes at that. “Yeah, and spooked the horse even more. Some things is worth doing patiently.” Sensing that Bonnie wasn’t easily shocked, and knowing she knew her share about life and men besides, she couldn’t resist the remark, “I always say that you learn a lot about a man’s ways towards women by looking at how he treats a horse.”

_Molly was off sulking again, and Susan off being her usual briskly efficient self, and the rest of the women were busy with the mending by the lakeshore. Out hunting as she usually was these days, Sadie still liked to spend some time in the afternoon or evening with the rest of them, because otherwise she’d miss these talks. Otherwise, the camp was fairly quiet with most of the men off doing jobs. Arthur was asleep on his cot for now, fever still raging, and Hosea sat there reading, keeping an anxious eye. Strange man, Arthur Morgan. Some of the things he’d said to her in his fever delirium were things she didn’t much like to think about. He could still die, and she still didn’t know him all that well, but what she’d seen, he was better and kinder than he pretended to be._

_Karen nodded towards Kieran, busy as ever over with the horses. “I think that boy spends most of his time with the horses, not people.” That was fine by Sadie. Kieran had ridden with the O’Driscolls, and even if he seemed like a nice enough boy, and she’d lost her desire to see him dead, she still couldn’t bring herself to trust him. If they’d taken him along to Pinetree Gulch, would he have stood by and let it all happen? Probably. He seemed too eager to please, too weak to protest._

_“He’s a nice fella, Kieran,” Mary-Beth said defensively, stabbing the needle into the sock she was darning with more vigor. “He’s just shy is all. And it ain’t like most of the men treat him anything nice. Arthur’s about the only one who don’t treat him like he’s outright invisible. Ain’t nothing wrong with a man liking horses, and being good to them.”_

_“I always say you can tell a lot about a man by how he treats his horse, you know,” Sadie told them. So by those lights, maybe Kieran wasn’t so bad. He was always sweet to the horses. Just seemed to lack a spine, and she would always find that hard to respect. A man who always bent over backwards the please, and who couldn’t ever stand up for the right thing, wasn’t much of a man._

_“What you mean by that?” Karen asked._

_“She’s right,” Tilly answered her. It didn’t surprise Sadie that it was clever Tilly who got it first, whose early years had been brutal enough. “Ain’t much difference between a woman and a horse, under the law. A man outright owns us, either our daddy or our husband.”_

_Abigail caught on next. “Suppose that’s the truth. He owns your babies too--if he claims them, anyway. He can ride you whenever he likes. Beat you if he likes. Lock you away when he likes. Get rid of you for a younger one when he likes.” Sadie caught Karen’s furtive glance toward Dutch’s tent at that, and had to agree. While she respected the man, his obvious interest in Mary-Beth, and how she’d heard Molly was just the latest in a string of women who never seemed much older than twenty-five, struck a sour chord._

_Mary-Beth finally agreed. “I can’t much argue that. Seen my share of men who were decent to their horses and mean as wolverines to women. Because they put more value on the horse.”_

_“Bill,” Tilly muttered with a roll of her eyes, and Abigail gave a half-nod at that._

_“Tell me you ever seen a man who was a bastard to his horse and sweet as sugar to his wife and daughters, and I’ll call you a liar,” she challenged them._

_“So why the hell you ever married, Sadie?” Karen asked bluntly. “If men are that terrible? We know you was happy with your Jake.”_

_“Plenty of lousy men.” Including in this camp, given Bill was as about as dumb as a sack of horseshit, and she’d had to outright threaten Micah. “But they ain’t all bad. You find a good man, one who sees you as his partner rather than another thing he can own? That’s everything. Makes it all worth it. And well, Jake was good with horses.” She caught Abigail’s angry and hopeful glance towards John’s tent at that, and wished she could put a boot up John Marston’s ass for him not bothering to love that golden future that was standing right in front of him._

She watched Arthur step closer, get a hand on the dapple’s neck, giving it a gentle pat, still talking all the while. A good man with horses, all right, and good to women too. She knew that. Bonnie let out a low chuckle at that. “Never thought about it just that way, but maybe you got the right of it. How long you two been married anyhow?” 

“Ah…about a year and a half now.” Sticking to the story by this point felt almost effortless, that whole strange fiction they’d cooked up together over the past year or so. “Right about when we learned he had TB.” 

“Well, he don’t look like it now.”

“No,” she agreed, giving him one last glance as he kept standing there, patiently calming that horse still. “He sure don’t.” Every time she looked at him and saw him strong and healthy, that helped quiet that fear in her heart.

Bonnie gestured Sadie towards the house. “C’mon, should be getting breakfast on. Let’s get at it before the men hurry in and grab all the bacon.”

They left three days later, pockets full of a bit more pay, and Drew’s insistence on paying their train fare to Benedict Station when he’d heard they were off to see her folks’ graves. She again felt that pull to stay longer, to gradually sink into this life and its rhythms, but resisted it well enough. This place wasn’t her home, and couldn’t be. 

Drew held his hand out to Arthur first. “You’ll always be welcome here, son.” He glanced over at Sadie, holding her eyes with his and giving her a decisive nod to let her know that she was a part of that also. “Both of you. I hope you’ll stop by again, and soon.”

Arthur hesitated, and well as she knew him now, she could practically see that black pall of guilt descending over him. He couldn’t take that mismatch between the way folks saw him, and the weight of the truth, especially with people who she could tell he desperately wanted to respect him, people he hoped to see again. He needed that honesty, and so she wasn’t at all surprised to hear him say, “That’s real kind, but you should know I ain’t who you think I am, sir.” She only hoped he didn’t blurt the whole thing.

“Oh?” Drew’s eyebrows rose, and he dropped his hand to his side. “What are you, then? One of them bomb-throwing anarchists? A bigamist? A fire-eater from a carnival?”

Arthur managed a nervous chuckle at that last one. “I been some pretty rough things. I ran with an outlaw gang for years. I…” He shook his head, trying to find the right words. “I could say the way I grown up, for so long I couldn’t see the world as anything but rotten. Seemed like there was no place to be anything but a bad man. Even when I wanted it different. But I suppose in the end, the reasons don’t matter. I was who I was. I done the things I done.”

She felt the swell of pride in her at him, that sheer humility and bravery in him to face all that squarely, along with the fear that as ever, maybe he trusted too much and too quickly. “Why are you telling me all that?” Drew asked, after not replying for a few long moments.

“I don’t hold with the notion of taking advantage of you and your family by...making you think I’m someone I maybe ain’t.”

“You that man anymore?”

“No.” Arthur gave him an awkward smile and shrug. She noticed he said it decisively at least, no prevaricating and saying he was unsure, that he hoped to be better than he had been. So maybe he had changed enough to accept it. “No need to count your silver, I swear.”

“Then there’s no shame in trying to be a better man than you was. I wish more could.” Drew put his hand out again. “Offer still stands.” 

Arthur looked at it a moment, then smiled one of those rare, genuine smiles of his that just about lit up his whole face, reaching out to shake Drew’s hand. “All right, then, sir.” He touched the brim of his hat politely. “Miss MacFarlane.”

“It’s Bonnie,” she said in exasperation. “I only been saying that the past three days.”

“Give him more time and he’ll come around,” Sadie told them dryly. It would take a bit more time for it to settle on him that it was OK, that they truly liked him, and it wasn’t presumptuous to accept that familiarity. 

They could have ridden to Tumbleweed, true, but sparing the horses, and sparing Arthur, felt like the smart call there. They’d have their time in the dust and desert heat on the trip from Tumbleweed back towards Armadillo, and then south back to Chuparosa.

Besides, it was the first train they’d been on since that furtive nighttime escape from Wapiti all the way to Chuparosa. Easy even now to recall how tense and anxious and frightful it had been between Arthur’s precarious hold on living, the risk of being caught by the law, and the uncertainty of the future. So letting themselves overwrite that a bit with something so banal helped. Two ordinary folks making a short hop through the New Austin desert, that was all. She noticed with some amusement that of course they filled the seat again, pressed up against each other--maybe even more so than last time, given he’d gained back a fair amount of weight and muscle, so his shoulder and thigh crowded hers even more. But he didn’t try to curl away like an armadillo this time into space that wasn't there, worrying so much about an imposition that didn’t even exist.

The train took off into the morning, and while she doubted most folk were getting off at Benedict Station, it was crowded enough with people presumably continuing on towards Escalera and the like that they couldn’t say much without being overheard. So she let herself enjoy the ride, looking out the window at the familiar landscape going by as they headed west into the red desert beyond Hennigan’s Stead. Near five years now since she’d left. Quiet at Armadillo too, nobody coming on, but perhaps it was early in the morning for that.

She could see Tumbleweed in the distance as the railroad ringed around it, winding south, trying to put all her thoughts and feelings into some kind of order. She’d assumed she’d never come back, that her bones would rest up in the western Grizzlies. She’d assumed a whole hell of a lot of things at twenty-eight that had been proven wrong since.

But perhaps she needed this, much as Arthur still needed to sometimes carefully admit part of his past to people so he didn’t feel like a cheat in gaining their respect. She must have been staring out the window, lost in thought, because she felt Arthur’s hand on her arm. “You OK?”

“Just about. I was thinking is all.” She couldn’t help but be gratified he reached down and took her hand. 

“See, I ain’t sure just yet whether it’s thinking, or not thinking, that’s more dangerous. Both of them seem to get me into a world of trouble.”

She rolled her eyes at him, but smiled as she did it, and they got the rest of the way to Benedict Station in a companionable silence.

At the station, Bob and Buell off the horse car and hitching up into the saddle, they headed back northeast. She led the way, familiar with the path. “You remember any of New Austin?” she asked him.

“Not much. I was six when we left for the west, and I suppose saying we was around Armadillo is putting it politely. Ain’t like we had a place. Rented a house sometimes, camped a lot, borrowed abandoned cabins and houses. We stayed closest to Armadillo mostly, I suppose, but mostly it was wherever Daddy could scare up some work before he pissed someone off, or until we was running again from the law. Plenty of places to hide in the state, back then. I expect I seen pretty much all of New Austin, just don’t much remember it. And we wasn’t back here at all after Momma died and he took to wandering half the damn country with me in tow. Went west, went south. The South was such chaos after the war he must have figured it’d make for good pickings. Even was in Lemoyne for a few weeks, I think. But I was only--eight, nine, maybe? It all blurred. The people. The places.”

“So you learned to not count on anything, and I learned to get too tied to a plot of land. We make a real pair, don’t we?”

“We do all right, I’d say,” he answered. He gave her a glance and a wry smile. “Just hoping my father didn’t rob yours back in them days.” 

She nudged Bob to pick up his speed, starting to see familiar territory once again. “If he didn’t, ain’t like it’s on you. That whole ‘sins of the father’ thing is bullshit. Besides, sounds like you take more after your momma, from what I can figure she must have been like.” From what little he could remember of her, and what he said about his father, she had to believe that was true. Sadie had to figure Beatrice Morgan as someone who’d loved and trusted too easily too, that she’d ended up with a real bastard of a husband, yet tough enough to risk herself and protect her boy from harm, and to live that nomadic life. A strong woman, gone too soon, but Sadie expected those echoes passed down to her son. 

“Maybe. And which side do I have to thank for you?” 

“That’d be my momma. Daddy was more of a dreamer. Momma was stubborn as a box of rocks, wouldn’t take no shit, tough as nails. July of ‘63, she didn’t have no brothers, so she was the one sitting up all night with a pistol guarding the door, because they was only about 10 miles away from Gettysburg. My father, he never was quite sure whether he actually proposed to her. They’d got fond of each other that past Christmas when he was home on leave, you see, and then in April of ‘65 he made it home alive--missing two fingers that got shot off, but alive--so she was damn impatient. Henry was born just over eight months after the wedding.”

He laughed at that, flashing her a sly grin. “We had this doctor out in Montana we was friendly with, Hank Rupert. Told me once it was a damn miracle how many big, healthy babies were born ‘early’ seven, eight months after a wedding.”

“Well, I can’t act superior. Could have been me and Jake, easy enough, if we’d got careless.” Though she only realized now how big the risk would have been, having children way up in Pinetree Gulch. With Jake having to ride all the way to Strawberry, there was no way of getting a doctor, or even a midwife, easily if things went wrong. It would have been her and Jake and that was all. She could easily have died birthing those children they’d wanted so much, and much as she still mourned that lost chance, the cold shiver of seeing clearly how much she’d have taken her life into her hands by it had hit her. That proud defiance they’d both had in spades had cost them, and could have cost them even without O’Driscolls. Pregnancy, an animal attack, frostbite needing an amputation--they’d lived on the razor’s edge of danger all the time, one medical emergency away from being doomed.

Something in him sobered, the shine of humor dying down to cold ashes. “Well, even if Eliza had agreed to marry me, Isaac came along only two months later once I knew. No fooling anyone there.” He sighed at that. “Maybe best we didn’t fool ourselves neither. That it would have worked. She was smarter than me.”

“You don’t know it wouldn’t have worked. You was both young, and you didn’t wanna budge, that was all.”

“I meant in the long run, the way it was. Things was gonna come to a head eventually. She’d find someone, or Isaac would get old enough to ask questions about why he only had a daddy a few days here and there. Maybe we’d have done all right if I quit the gang and stayed with her. Or maybe we’d have ended up hating each other and feeling stuck. Her, or Mary, had that happened. I don’t know, even now. Guess I’ve always been a Goddamn fool when it comes to women.” He shook his head, jamming his hat down further on his head, and rode on, the waves of awkward anger rolling off him.

She wished she had the answer for him, but her own business occupied her thoughts, riding as they were into a storm of memory for her. She somehow wasn’t surprised to see, as they passed by the farms on either side of the northbound road into Tumbleweed, that the bank had been busy. The houses, barns, all of it, had been cleared off, razed to nothingness. As if they’d never been, never taken up so much pain, effort, sweat, blood, and tears of two families. 

She reined Bob in, suddenly feeling cold despite the desert sun. She heard Buell’s whuffing breath behind her, the jingle of harness, and knew Arthur was right there. “Well, guess there ain’t nothing left,” she said bleakly, nodding towards the blasted, blank expanse of desert that she and Jake fought so hard, gave so much, to try and save. Had they even waited a month after she and Jake signed the papers for the sale to come scrub it all away? “Them buzzards from the bank erased everything. Like it was tracks in the sand. Like...we was nothing. I guess I ain’t surprised, but...” It still hurt, all the same.

He leaned forward in his saddle, touching her shoulder for a moment to catch her attention. “Look. Take it from a man who’s been a rambler. Two weeks after we left Horseshoe and Clemens, wouldn’t have been nothing left to say near two dozen people made their lives there for a time. I don’t even know where my momma’s buried exactly. Somewhere in southwest Oregon, that’s all I got. And knowing what a useless shit my daddy was, maybe she never even had a marker. Places and things, they don’t last, but that don’t mean that them people didn’t matter. It’s here,” he tapped his chest, then his temple, “and here. The people you loved, the memories of them? You got that, for always. Can’t nobody take it.”

He had that right, and it eased the pain inside her to know it, and remind herself of it. Would it have been better to see the place dilapidated and even more run down, depressing as hell? There was no chance this could have gone well, either way it went. She’d made her choice to leave, and to try to let the guilt of that go. There could have been no good life for her and Jake here, the place even more desolate than it had been five years ago. She could see that now, clearer than ever. “Thanks.” She turned Bob towards town, feeling strangely stronger for having come here and seen it, and faced it.

He caught up to her on Buell, asking, “You wanna go pay your respects, and I’ll catch up with the sheriff, check for posters?” 

She couldn’t help the gratitude at that, the graceful offer to leave her to that business by herself rather than imposing. He was a good man, and a good friend, but this was something she wanted to face without him. Just the same as if he’d known where to visit his mother’s grave, she’d have hung back and let him have that moment. “All right then.”

Tumbleweed had continued dying its slow death, the buildings even more weathered and sun-faded, but they still stood, and people still lived there. People cared enough to tend the graveyard even now, the headstones clean and the weeds pulled. That eased her mind and heart too, knowing that even without her there, and with Jake gone, that someone had tended those graves anyhow with kindness. 

There they were: her parents, Grandma Rosie, Grandpa Owen, and Henry. Jake’s folks in the next row back, and his baby sister Hanna. She picked a few of the white primroses growing in the churchyard for her mother, because she’d always loved them, and laid them gently on the grave there. Maybe she ought to do like Arthur, and take a plant with her back to Chuparosa. That little succulent was still growing strong in its jar, far from its roots in Oregon.

“It’s me,” she said, kneeling by the graves. “Been a while, I know. Bet you never expected to see me again, saying goodbye for good as Jake and me thought we was. And...lot of things happened since them. I expect you know all that, though.” She managed to not instinctively look to the next row, looking for some ghost of Jake there at his family’s graves, an echo of that farewell they’d made five years ago. “And Grandma Rosie, well, I did end up in a convent for a time, didn’t I, but that turned out OK. Think it even did me some good. I ain’t like I was. But I’m still here, and making a go of it as best I can. Trying to figure it all out. Wish you was here to ask about all of it.”

She stayed there another minute, but at least being there filled her with a sort of peace rather than grief. Then she stood, dusting off the knees of her pants. “Be seeing you again, I imagine.”

Then she moved to the next row. Uncle William and Aunt Elsie hurt more in a way. She’d taken their son up to the mountains and he’d died there, was buried there all alone. Standing there looking at their joint headstone, it struck her that she’d never seen Jake’s grave. 

But after all that insistence that she never would go back, she knew now that had been her ferocious self-protectiveness at work when she’d needed it. She couldn’t face the idea of going back to where it all happened, facing all of what had happened. She could do that now, maybe. Plus there was the painful notion that the only people who’d been to Jake’s grave were the three strangers who’d buried him as a courteous kindness, and any wanderers picking the bones of a burned homestead. Arthur had seen Jake’s grave. She hadn’t. That suddenly hurt like something she hadn’t known was bleeding all this time. 

She owed him better than that. But chances were she’d have to make her peace with it, because it was so damn far, and she couldn’t go alone, couldn’t ask Arthur to go on that kind of mission simply for that and to make that kind of journey even if he was physically up to the task, and she wasn’t certain he was at this point. 

Would she even be buried up there now with him, when she did die? A year ago she’d have asked for it, without question, because there was no other path but to be reunited with him. 

Now? She wasn’t sure. She’d changed so much that being buried alongside him pretending nothing had happened since and she was only the loving wife she’d been, the woman Jacob Adler had known, felt like too much for all the effort to drag her body up there to the wilderness for the sheer show of it. Maybe that was a sign she’d chosen to live, but it was a painful one to realize. Jake should have someone there who’d known and loved him, at least once. It felt like a weight inside her to recognize it now, knowing that, feeling the searing guilt of some kind of failure as a wife to give him even that basic a respect in her mourning. She wasn’t going to be buried alongside him, she hadn’t even been to see his grave. True, she hadn’t had the chance given everything going on, but she hadn’t exactly been chewing at the bit impatient to go see to that duty. 

Darkness clouded her thoughts easily enough, the awkward shame that maybe she’d been trying to save herself at first by saving Arthur, but somewhere things had shifted. He’d saved her, she’d saved him, that was how it went, over and over, but facing Jake’s parents, knowing that in heaven they and Jake saw that for however long now she’d been increasingly enjoying another man’s company, hit her hard. 

The defensive justification that it _wasn’t like that_ between her and Arthur felt like a fragile tissue-paper fiction now when she took a look as hard and clear as diamond. She’d laughed with him, danced with him, shared a home and a bed with him, easily lying to everyone by now that he was her husband. They owned a cat together, for God’s sake. She’d effectively made a life with him. Did it really matter at this point that he never touched her like that, never kissed her, hadn’t ever been inside her? Was the fact she hadn’t done that the only thing that kept her from truly betraying Jake? 

Walking away from Will and Elsie Adler’s graves, she made it to the wall of the cemetery on shaking legs, sitting down, leaning back against the sun-warmed stone. Covered her eyes with her hands, all the fictions unraveling inside her all at once. 

How many times lately had she been looking at him, eyes lingering on that strong, broad frame of his, telling herself it was relief at seeing that he was healthy again? Thinking how much she enjoyed being around him, how lucky she was to have a man like that for a friend? Admitting to herself he was a handsome man, especially now that he smiled and laughed more often, that hair of his lightened to a tawny shade by the desert sun, green eyes bright with mischief or quiet pleasure rather than sadness, but pretending it didn’t matter to her? 

She couldn’t say exactly when it had shifted, but it had. She’d been through this before. Been through that moment of realizing that her best friend was also something else now in her eyes, but while that had been all shy wonder with Jake, now this time it brought its share of agony with it. Things were a hell of a lot more complicated this time around than when she and Jake were silly young things discovering love together.

She tipped her head back, eyes closed. “Oh, shit.” Guilt surged up within her again. _Jake, I’m sorry, I’m sorry…I never meant for this to happen._

Not to mention even beyond that sickening feeling that she’d just failed Jake in the worst way possible, what the hell was she supposed to do with this? Go march up to Arthur, tell him, and--what? God, that man, and how terrible he’d had it in that forlorn existence that had passed for a life. He’d do just about anything for someone’s love, and that was the trouble. If she told him, if that started something between them, how would she ever know if he’d even really wanted that for himself, or if all that he had to give to her was that lonely need in him, and that desire to make her happy besides? 

She couldn’t. Even if she could do that to Jake, and how messed up was it to be thinking about this twenty feet from his parents’ graves, she couldn’t do that to Arthur. He’d been used and hurt enough in his life, hadn’t he? She didn’t want to be like Dutch, caring only about what she could get from a man who might just leap to do what she wanted. She couldn’t blame Mary and Eliza for looking out for their interests in this world that was so lousy to women, and Arthur had failed them both too in his way, but she really had no desire to be the third woman in his life to hurt him either.

Sitting there with all that in her mind, all sharp and painful, she startled hearing Arthur’s voice, opening her eyes to see him kneeling there beside her. “You all right?”

She avoided his eyes for a moment, not able to look just then, needing some time to get things right within her. She could claim it was just the sun making her dizzy, but he’d probably know that for total bullshit. “Yeah, I’m OK. Could use a drink.” That was the honest truth, and he’d likely assume it was just a rough interlude here in the cemetery.

He raised an eyebrow, giving her a conspiratorial smile. “Happily for you, I got some tequila in my saddlebag.”

“Good man.” This was about when normally she’d have given him a pat on the arm for that, and she cringed inside realizing just how carefully she’d hid behind seemingly innocent, but more and more frequent, touches. She straightened her kerchief. “How’d you make out with the sheriff?”

“Picked up some posters to add to the pile,” he answered. “One dynamite thief-slash-anarchist, and two Del Lobos. Of course.”

“Like a bunch of cockroaches, that lot,” she muttered, shaking her head.

“Well, we can worry about the idiot looking to blow himself to kingdom come and them De La Cucarachas later. Armadillo ain’t more than about an hour if we ride a bit harder. We get there, check for posters, get a drink and some grub at the saloon, I imagine, wait out midday, then head home.”

“Sure.” She was a grown woman of nearly thirty-three. She could handle this, rather than acting like an idiot. She would handle it. Though when he handed her the bottle of tequila, she gratefully took a drink, handing it back to him, careful to not touch his hand in doing so. She’d better figure this out by tonight because otherwise acting like a skittish virgin around him was going to be one huge damn clue to him that something was off, but here in Tumbleweed, it was too damn hard to think. “Let’s get going. Ain’t nothing here to hold me.” The ghosts and the guilt would be riding with her.

Though seeing smoke in the distance puzzled her, and when they arrived in Armadillo, she saw they’d launched from her own private hell into a very real one. Burning what looked like furniture, clothing, bedding, in bonfires right there on the street. There were only a few grey, exhausted people on the town’s street, and a listlessly barking dog. She glanced at the papers plastered everywhere, a notice printed in bold black letters. One word leaped out at her: **CHOLERA**. Her heart practically jumped in her throat at that.

Shouting down at the other end of the street caught her attention, and Arthur was already in motion down that way, and she followed.

Three men stood outside the sheriff’s office, and one raised a repeater at them. “Back off, OK? We got some business with the sheriff.”

Another one yelled towards the door, “You gonna bring him out? We rode a long way, and not just to shoot up your jail house!”

She glanced at Arthur and at least for that moment, all the worries melted away. This they could do together, and always had done, easily. The sheriff walked out, escorting an apparent prisoner.

“You boys Del Lobos?” Arthur said, tone casual.

“Yeah, what of it?” one said, giving him a suspicious glance.

“Jesus, you boys really _are_ everywhere like a bunch of _cucarachas_.”

Pulling her revolver, she called, “Give Bill Shaw my regards when you see him in hell.” She knew Arthur would be right there with her on it. 

In a matter of seconds it was all over, four more corpses in Armadillo, blood pooling in the red dust of the street. The sheriff came down from the steps, staring at the scene, mouth agape. “Oh my. Oh my. If it wasn’t for you, sir, ma’am. If it wasn’t for you? How lucky we are. The heroes we so required. Armadillo is indebted to you. Though I fear it may be beyond saving.”

“Now hold up just a moment, mister,” Arthur broke in. “What in hell is going on here?” He flung out a hand, indicating the whole town.

“Cholera. It come over the town like wildfire, three days ago. Already most everyone’s dead, fled, or abed. Or...as close to a bed as they can get, I suppose. A lot of them are just dropping in their tracks.” He gave a nervous laugh. “Then these Del Lobos ride in and, well, my deputies all died too, so that was that.”

“Doctor?” she asked.

“Died, on the first day.” He shook his head, gesturing to the dead Del Lobo prisoner. “I don’t know what you made of that, but it was a close thing. And in light of that, and the sad demise of this settlement, I’m resigning my post.”

“Mister, seriously, you’re just gonna--”

He went on like a phonograph record, as if she hadn’t spoken, the fear in him almost a palpable thing. “You’ll see I’ve packed my valise. But the accoutrements of my profession remain in my desk.” He shuddered, as if a sudden chill wind had caught him. “I swear to you, there’s something powerful evil at work in this town right now, and I’m a simple man. I want no part of it.”

“Good luck to you, then,” Arthur said, eyeing him warily as he headed off for the train station.

She looked over at him. “What in the hell is going on here?”

“I dunno, but the last time I heard a settlement started bleating about powerful evil spirits at work, turned out a Goddamn mining company was poisoning the lot.” He shook his head, looking at a man slumped on the porch of the sheriff’s office, groaning softly to himself, then retching miserably. “These folk need a doctor. What ones are left, anyway.”

She turned her gaze south. “It’s either Chuparosa or Blackwater. And I ain’t inclined to ride into Blackwater causing a scene given the gang's history there. Chuparosa’s closer anyway, and we know Felipe. He’ll come.”

“Felipe does like him some apparently hopeless cases,” Arthur joked grimly. “We ride hard, we can get him back here before nightfall. Bob and Buell can make it to the river before we water them, cause no way they should be drinking from anything they got around here. Not with cholera.”

“All right. Let’s go.”

~~~~~~~~~~

**Sadie’s Journal**  
Writing this back in Chuparosa while we give the horses a rest and Felipe gathers his stuff. Arthur and me have volunteered to go back with him to help. No chance he can face all that alone, and so we are going. Cholera is a bastard but I suppose having been around folk dying of TB for over a year, and doing enough killing ourselves, we are hard to unsettle at this point with the notion of death.

If nothing else having two folk there who can handle a gun is a smart idea given we run into Del Lobos there already, and shot them dead trying to break one of their own out of jail. But the sheriff run off after that and his deputies died of the disease, so whoever survives the cholera is right now left completely defenseless. Fernandez at the train station is telegraphing the US Marshals to get whoever the hell is responsible for the area to come in and hold the line but that may take a few days.

It’s a terrible thing to be almost grateful for cholera to not have to think about my own troubles. But then I suppose I am feeling like a pretty miserable specimen of humanity about now so that just about fits. 

I always loathed them girls who’d tease a man like a dog with a bone and then cut him off, but I feel like I am doing that. Have done that. Things won’t be like they was with me and Arthur, me pushing myself on him all the damn time to have the shadow of something I could not admit to myself I wanted. But if I act different now and step back as I need, for both our sakes, of course that poor man is going to notice and blame himself. Probably drive himself frantic worrying about what he done to piss me off. I know him too well to think otherwise.

He’s a good man. I think some days maybe even he believes that now. Fought so hard for that goodness, and he deserves a chance to live as a good man rather than die as one like he planned. But am I in the way of that, stuck myself in his path like some stupid boulder?

Maybe I am not made for happiness. Not anymore. Seems I turned out a lousy wife to Jake and a lousy friend to Arthur in the end. What the hell was I thinking all this time, lying to myself? But it was all so easy, and it felt right, and some of it was what we had to do at the time. That all made it easy to pretend we wasn’t getting ourselves into something about damn impossible to untie ourselves from now.

I don’t know. I wish I was better. I wish I could talk to Jake about some of it. Wish I could talk to Arthur without worry that it's me pushing him rather than a thing he wants. At least I have comfort in the notion of helping the sick of Armadillo. I may be a mess of a woman still in ways I am only beginning to realize, but I can save lives. That’s something.


	18. Chuparosa I: A Pale Horse, A Dark Moon I

They’d been back in Armadillo only two days, and already, the wagon once again held six corpses laid out in the back on top of a ragged sheet of canvas. Seven now--Arthur placed the latest victim in there, laying her down carefully, tucking the blanket neatly around her face, covering the sunken eyes and cracked lips, the skin turned a peculiar blue-grey from the extreme dehydration. 

Flora--had that been her name? Florence? She’d fallen unconscious a few hours ago, and that was that. One of the few healthy men left, Pete Dugan, was apparently the town gravedigger, and he’d left last night, mentioned digging a mass grave out at Coot’s Chapel to handle it in the cool of the night, and he took the first wagonload with him. But here was another wagon full of them already.

He headed back into the saloon that Felipe had turned into an impromptu field hospital, given it was one of the largest buildings in town, the feeble groans and retching of the sick and dying filled the air. He’d quickly gotten used to the smell--shit that didn’t smell like shit at all, but strangely fishy, and more like water with grains of rice in it than anything. Buckets and buckets of it too, and he hadn’t had any notion that a human body held so much water to puke and shit. The feeblest ended up shitting themselves, for lack of any setup that would allow them to do otherwise, and most of the bodies in the wagon were wrapped in the fetid blankets or canvas of the pallet that they’d died upon.

Given Las Hermanas, coming back from the brink of death himself and spending so much time among the dying and those who clawed their way back to life, he couldn’t say he had much fear of disease anymore. TB was awful enough, with the coughing and retching, the pale, thin, and exhausted faces sitting out in the courtyard who sometimes eventually disappeared entirely to their rooms to die. But as deaths went, that was slow-smoldering coals, taking months or even years to do its work. That held its own kind of horror, true, but this was simply a different sort of terror. Cholera burned like wildfire, leaving the victims wracked in the endless cycle of purging like a rapidly leaking waterskin until the body simply gave out, in a matter of days or even hours.

He found Felipe tending a boy, maybe sixteen, who at least could still sit up and drink the full pitcher of water that Felipe gave to him. “Back of the wagon’s full, so I’ll take it out,” he said, lowering his voice and speaking in Spanish, trusting that most of the folks here weren’t fluent in it. “I expect we’ll need the space for more of them before tomorrow.” 

Felipe nodded, glancing back at him. “Will you be OK alone?”

“It’s a short drive is all. Hopefully them Del Lobos will stay away a few days till the Marshal gets here. Got my guns, it’ll be fine.” He gestured towards Sadie, busy mixing up another kettle full of Felipe’s recipe for pouring fluids back into the victims, thoroughly boiled water with some sugar and salt to replace what they’d lost. “You need her here more, I expect. I’ll be back in a couple hours at most.”

“Be careful,” Felipe answered. He nodded to acknowledge that, pushing the swinging half-doors open again, climbing up into the wagon seat. It was a lousy wagon, the wheels all out of true, but it would serve for the short, grim trip required.

Headed east, he got to the small, dusty churchyard, and found Dugan out back, unloading more corpses in the back of his own wagon. “Where you find them?” he asked, nodding.

“Homestead about a quarter-mile out from Armadillo,” Dugan answered, gesturing towards the west. “This shit, fella. Armadillo’s seen its share of hardships, but this one? Feels damn near Biblical.”

“Ain’t nothing about God in this. The Devil, maybe,” Arthur said tiredly, pulling the wagon up as close to the large pit as he could. The acrid smell of burned flesh hung in the air. “You burning them? Why?” he asked, seeing the charred remains as he did so, presumably from last night’s load.

“The mayor specified, before he run off,” Dugan replied. “For everyone’s safety. However the cholera got into the water supply, and the wells, they don’t want no risk of this many rotting corpses in the ground. Gonna have to dig another pit after this one, because they don’t want more than a couple dozen of them in one place.”

True enough. The hard thing about a desert town was a clean and ample water supply, and Armadillo, with its two wells, was particularly vulnerable there. “Help me with these ones, then.” He undid the backboard of the wagon, and reached for the first one. He’d pretty much lived in a bandana and gloves for the last two days against the contagion, snatching a few hours of sleep wherever he could sit down, and he could start to feel it taking its toll. He’d have to rest a bit when he got back, but he could get through this.

“Got me scouring the countryside for anyone dead who ain’t in town. Pays lucrative enough, anyway.”

He stared at the man, incredulous, his anger rising rapidly as a burst dam. An entire town become a sort of hell on earth, and he was worried about the money. It prodded him hard in too many memories. Beating Thomas Downes for thirty-odd dollars, because Dutch and Strauss insisted he stop avoiding it and go get that debt right _now_ , and he’d been pissed about that, pissed at Downes’ feeble protests, pissed at the idea of having to go back empty-handed and keep dealing with it, and he took it out on that poor bastard. Dragging Mark Johnson in to Rhodes for forty bucks, and maybe someday it would be him or John given no mercy, dangling at the end of a noose for a handful of dollars. Dutch crowing about the take at Cornwall Refinery, unconcerned about both a dying Eagle Flies and abandoning Arthur to die, rewriting reality as usual to make it into the story he wanted. Dutch whooping it up about the money from that final train job, shrugging off John’s supposed loss, not giving a shit about Abigail being taken. Suddenly he itched to grab the man by his collar and throw him in that damn pit along with the dead, or at least beat him senseless. “This about money for you? There’s more important things here than a damn _payday_. Now shut your mouth before I shut it for you, swear to God.” 

“Jesus, mister. No need to get ornery. Not like I’m gonna be earning money on coffins or the like on all this, and I gotta earn a living.”

“Well, good luck earning a living in a ghost town,” he said grimly, putting the last of the corpses in the pit. Dugan poured a tin of kerosene over them, then struck a match, throwing it in. With one last glance at the sudden inferno, the black, oily smoke now rolling up, he turned away. Took a few minutes among the gravestones, not because he particularly wanted to, because the roasting smell from the pit was unsettling, but because he needed it after the drive and the labor of those bodies in the searing midday heat.

He found the grave of Bonnie’s brother who’d died of TB himself, Hank, just twelve years old. How much more terrible the disease must be for a kid, unable to understand everything going on in those long months or even years of suffering, choking, suffocating, and the pitiful slow fading of a life barely begun, a life where Hank hadn’t even had choices to make yet, let alone find some peace in settling his affairs. He’d died loved, to judge from Drew MacFarlane, but it felt such a forlorn death all the same. _Least I suppose Isaac died quickly. A couple minutes, maybe, being afraid at strange scary men suddenly in his momma’s home, then...all over._ He’d never thought of it as a mercy before. A barbed and backhanded mercy, to be sure, but there it stood. “Sorry, kid,” he murmured, putting a gloved hand on Hank’s gravestone. “It’s a hell of a way to go. Hope you and your brothers are doing all right.” He glanced aside, saw Dugan leaning against the shed, smoking a cigarette out of earshot, so he kept talking. “You chance to see Isaac McCready, he could use some brothers to look after him. Just a little thing, he was. Growing up without other kids around too.”

Climbing into the wagon again, he headed back towards Armadillo, a plume of smoke behind him, more smoke ahead where the pyres still burned in town to destroy the belongings of the infected and dead. Over to his right, a flock of black-winged vultures picked at the bones of something amongst the cacti. Hopefully not another cholera victim. 

He kept carefully alert in case of Del Lobos or other miscreants, but the road stood largely empty. But about halfway back to town, he ran into someone walking the road, and it caught his breath, seeing a familiar face, the stooped and white-haired figure. What the hell was this man doing all the way down in New Austin?

He stopped the wagon, soothing the horses quietly. “You need a ride, mister?”

The blind man turned his face towards Arthur, staring at him with those milky sightless eyes, and a small half-smile came over his face. “Ah, a voice I haven’t heard in a while.”

“Ain’t a good idea for you to be traveling these roads alone.” Alone and blind at that, but he wasn’t going to be stupid and rude enough to say that. “More than a few bandits, and there’s cholera in Armadillo. I can...well, I gotta get back to Armadillo, but...”

“You have your path. I have mine.”

Arthur sighed, climbing down and digging in his satchel, counting out ten bucks. “Then take some money at least, will you.” He’d helped the man out before, taking pity on a blind beggar wandering the wilderness, and endured whatever cryptic utterings he’d thrown out there as payment for a dollar given here and there.

Though some of those weird would-be prophecies, vaguely as he recalled them, had seemed to take on a new resonance. One about standing fast, loyalty being both his curse and his salvation. Stuff about hiding what mattered, about having been misguided most of his life. Something about what was killing him helping him to see things better. Another one about getting bad news, and then eventually, getting to Paradise. He couldn’t help but break into a sheepish smile at that. _Paradise. Nuevo Paraiso. I’ll be damned._ He turned his instinctive chuckle at it into a soft cough.

Either the man was a huckster fit to beat Hosea, or possibly, just possibly, there was some eerie second sight to him that could divine those truths. He wasn’t sure what to believe. But he found himself listening closely all the same as the man’s hard hand folded around the cash, and he said, “Then I shall see the morrows for you again, young man.” He closed his unseeing eyes. “A pale horse rides wild beneath a dark moon. You are marked by a man in black, and until that debt is claimed, you shall choose your past or your future, again and again. The serpent sleeps, for now, but all slumbering things awaken anew. Great heights are your crossroads, and bring to you great fear and courage, great sorrow and hope, great hate and love. Far you have journeyed, and farther still to go--but be a seeker, sir, not a wanderer.”

He tried to fix those words in his mind as best he could with a mind to jot them down later to puzzle over, though some were already escaping. Crazy superstition maybe, but perhaps there was some hidden wisdom to them all the same. That thing about great heights and crossroads, well, he’d nearly died on a mountaintop, and chosen his way there. As for that man in black chasing him, he could only hope like hell that wasn’t some sheriff or bounty hunter bound to catch up with him eventually. “All right then. All the best.”

He scribbled down what he could remember of the old man’s words in his journal, and then carried on towards Armadillo, watching the old blind man heading back east. Hopefully he’d make it to Hennigan’s Stead and the MacFarlane ranch. Wasn’t like there was much west, between slowly dying Tumbleweed and the catastrophe that Armadillo was currently.

Tumbleweed had rattled Sadie hard, that much was clear. She’d looked like she’d seen a ghost when he found her in that graveyard, curled up against the wall. Fierce and brave and strong as she was, sometimes it was easy to forget she was only human too, and even she had her limits. She’d probably had to face too much between her folks’ farm being totally erased, and those graves. He expected that she had to be thinking too of another destroyed homestead, another grave, far away in Ambarino.

If she was trying to make her farewells, should he ask if she wanted to go, tell her that of course he’d go with her if she wanted him there? She’d never seen her husband’s grave, and loyal and loving as she’d clearly been with Jake, that had to hurt. Maybe she needed that still. It was a long journey, but she’d made an even longer one to keep him alive, so it wasn’t like he could complain. 

Or was that some splinter of selfishness lodged in him, some absurdly dumb hope that stuck around in spite of his best efforts--was it the idea that if she could say goodbye to Jake now, make her peace there, then _maybe_ there was a chance? No matter how many times he told himself sharply as he could that was never going to happen, easier said than done. He’d held on to Mary, tooth and nail, for years and years, even as he rationally knew it was pointless. He could make himself shove that hope into a safe strong as any that ever existed in a bank, lock all that in a heavy steel vault besides, and carry on with his life. But that only contained it. It didn’t make it go away entirely. 

Better to worry about it another day. They had plenty to keep them occupied just now with the cholera epidemic. He only hoped she’d be all right, because seeing her that off-kilter, at the end of her rope, only made him wish he knew how to fix it. Though at least she wasn’t killing people from it this time. 

He found Sadie tending the fire in front of the saloon, hauling yet another kettle of water to hang it on the hook for boiling. The hell of it was that they needed so much water for cleaning things, for mixing up that solution of Felipe’s to pour down folks’ throats, for drinking water themselves because with as much as they were sweating tending to victims in the desert heat they couldn’t drink only booze. But they had only the presumably cholera-infested wells, so that meant constantly boiling more and more water to kill the contagion before using it. 

Sadie picked up the thick squares of leather beside the fire, picking up the kettle she’d just set down, still bubbling with the residual heat of the cast iron. Hauling it over to the saloon, he set it down next to two other full kettles already waiting, waxed canvas tied tightly over their tops to avoid dust and other crap getting into them, cooling down to be ready for use. Put a cover on that one, and he followed her in, heading for the washbasin near the bar. Crouching beside a fresh bucket of steaming hot water, he grabbed the bar of harsh lye soap, and scrubbed up his gloves once again, trying to kill any traces of cholera or other nastiness from handling the corpses. After that, he gave them a good rinse of whiskey besides--the bartender had quickly shut up and donated his supply for disinfecting stuff once he realized there was an genuine doctor at work here. He’d burn the gloves when this was all done anyway, but they would have been ruined anyhow. 

Heading back to Felipe, he said, “All right, I’m back.” 

Felipe looked up at him. “Good. Go see what supplies you can get from the general store. We’re about out of salt and sugar already, and those that are still surviving will soon need something solid to get in their stomachs. Some kind of mush, preferably, that’s easy to digest. See if you can get some oats or cornmeal or the like.”

“You’re the doc,” Arthur said with a shrug. Though he saw Sadie go right back to one of the patients lying on the floor. Was there some reason Felipe seemed to have him do everything else and have her working directly with the victims? It was only a short walk down the street to the general store, and as he walked in the door, he tugged down the bandana. The last thing he needed was some shopkeeper who’d stuck it out through this disaster getting panicked, and shooting a man for walking into his place wearing a mask. The Del Lobos had been around at least a little. He’d have reasonable fears of bandits. “Hello, we’re here helping folk with the cholera--”

Clearly there was no need to worry about the man being twitchy, because as he looked up from his counter, cool as anything, it could have been just another Armadillo day. “Good day, sir. Welcome to the establishment.” He peered at Arthur’s face. “Weren’t you in here before?”

“Nope.”

“You have the look of a fella who was in here. Years ago. But he was darker. Some Welshman with that sing-songy accent. He robbed me, as his sort are wont to do. His wife was in here too, and their brat. Always had to watch all of them. I knew any of them would steal things, given a chance. It’s in their blood. ‘Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a thief’, you know.”

He’d heard that particular nursery rhyme, given more than a few folks had mockingly recited it at his father. The notion of a Welshman as a born thief was out there, and Lyle Morgan sure as hell hadn’t done much to dispel it. Though neither had he, even if Hosea and Dutch hadn’t known it, Arthur did. Wondered sometimes if it truly was just in his blood. _Taffy was a Welshman, Taffy was a sham._ Maybe that particular couplet still fit him. 

Though of course his miserable excuse for a father would have robbed the Armadillo general store. To judge from this man’s grey hair, sure, he could easily have been its proprietor thirty years ago. Hearing that he looked like Lyle Morgan hit uncomfortably close to home, though every time he’d looked at that picture he’d known it. He’d gotten his mother’s coloring, but his father’s looks, his big solid build. He leaned on the counter. “I sound Welsh to you, mister?”

“No, sir, you sound like a trueborn American. And I guarantee you that Herbert Moon carries only good solid American-made goods. Nothing foreign here.”

“Well that’s just delightful to hear.” He managed to hold his tongue enough to tend to the task at hand. “We need some things. Salt, sugar, oats and cornmeal if you got them. Um...guess some canned rations wouldn’t hurt.” It wasn’t like they’d have time to cook a good meal, and he knew they could quickly heat canned stuff over the fire if need be.

Going to the shelves, Moon hauled down the order, chattering away. “I saw some Mexican come in here earlier. Nobody asked him to come here to America. Taking away the work from good folks.” Arthur thought wryly that now he understood exactly why Felipe had sent him to do this. Sadie, in her pants, would probably also get a lecture. “Herbert Moon’s seen some things, but this town’s fallen, oh, how it’s fallen. It was full of all sorts of degenerates and parasites and foreigners. This cholera, sir? It’s a blessing. A cleansing. Much needed, much welcomed.”

Jesus, if this man didn’t shut his mouth, a prospective beating might be the least of his worries. “So what I’m hearing is you pretty much hate everyone. A real man of equality, ain’t you.” He glanced behind Moon and saw a picture that at first looked vaguely like Trelawney, but as he looked closer, it wasn’t. A dark-featured man in a top hat, and something about it disturbed him, like a thing caught only from the corner of his eye, and gone when he turned. There was a nudge of something familiar about him deep in his mind, but he couldn’t find quite what it was. 

A shiver went down his spine, and he couldn’t say exactly why. But as much as those damn fools up in Butcher Creek bleating about spirits had been wrong, and as much as the rational part of him knew it was probably just some poor cholera-infected bastard who’d died in exactly the wrong place and infected those wells, there was suddenly a feeling of something here in Armadillo. Some strangeness, some wrongness. The sort of thing that people never quite outgrew looking for fearfully in shadowed corners, felt it sneaking up behind them. Not the wrath of God, not the Devil either, but some formless, nameless evil darkness that had always been there and always would be.

He grabbed the sacks of the order, and slapped the cash down harder than warranted, half tempted to just take the stuff as a “charitable donation” to the town’s struggle to survive. But he’d be no better than his father then, robbing this pathetic store, and not nearly the man he wanted to be either. It galled him to pay this asshole good money, but it was all in the interest of being the better man in the end. “That Mexican is a doctor here trying with everything he’s got to save folk, while you’re in here not even doing the first Goddamn thing to help, but being gleeful over their dying. Says plenty to me about which of you is by far the better man. Known plenty of Indians, Mexicans, black folk, Chinese, Jews, and white folk, good and bad. Some of the finest folk I’ve known, your kind would spit on. Quality ain’t a man’s blood, it’s his actions, you miserable turd. So this _Taffy’s_ hoping I never have to see your face again.”

Pausing at the door, he added in Welsh, “Oh, and given I imagine how rough you treated my momma, I don’t remember if I did steal anything when I was little, but if so, I ain’t sorry for it now.”

He made it only halfway across the street before he muttered, “Shit,” the feeling of satisfaction quickly fading. He hadn’t been wrong, but he might have won the battle but lost the war. It might have to be Sadie to go next time if they needed more supplies. 

Back in the saloon, he put the supplies down on the bar, then headed for the row of pallets, ready to get back to helping the business of cleaning them up, helping them drink what seemed an unholy amount of water. Felipe cut him off along the way. “No. You’re tired. You’re going to go get some rest.”

He glanced towards the sick and dying. “There some reason you and Sadie keep having me do most everything else, and don’t let me around them as much? Don’t think I ain’t noticed.”

Felipe sighed, leaning against the bar, sheer exhaustion sunk into the way he carried himself. “I hate letting you tend the sick, or even hauling the corpses, being honest, so I’m trying to keep that to a minimum where I can. You’ve been out of Las Hermanas for a little over two months. You’re still recovering. You’re pushing yourself hard. If you catch cholera, if you survive that--and your body’s reserves for fighting back are still lower than most--then I pretty much give you a damn guarantee your TB will be back with a vengeance. It won’t matter if I give you a refill on the pneumothorax right on schedule as usual--and I’m hoping I can--if that happens.” He stared directly into Arthur’s eyes. “So yes. There’s a reason. Sadie and I are better able to take that risk right now.”

It was like Sadie urging him all those times to let her put herself at the greater risk, and having to finally accept that she did it from love and concern, not dismissing him. He looked away, nodded, not liking it, feeling like he should do more, but accepting it all the same. “All right.”

“Good. Then go get some sleep. You need it. Doctor’s orders.” He raised his voice in Sadie’s direction. “You too. I’m going to need you both resting now so you can tend people through the night while I rest.” 

“All right,” Sadie agreed, pushing herself up from where she’d been helping one of the patients to drink, hands on the small of her back, stretching it out, then plodding wearily behind the bar to where they’d made up a rough pallet to catch some sleep. Peeling off their gloves and masks, leaving them on the bar, he lay down, trying to give her some space.

“You OK?” Sadie asked.

“Just about.” As OK as anyone could be in this situation, anyhow. “That shopkeeper is a miserable piece of work.”

“Ornery?”

“No, but he don’t much like Mexicans, Jews, immigrants, Chinese--”

“Ah, that sort.” She rolled her eyes, propping herself up on an elbow alongside him. “Too common, sorry to say. Guess there was some advantages to living in the middle of nowhere.”

He lowered his voice. “You got a funny feeling about all this?”

Her brow furrowed. “What you mean?”

“I mean, like--there’s something bad at work here. Not just bad luck.” He shook his head, crossing his arms over his chest. “It don’t feel right. Like there’s some kind of curse, I guess.” He remembered Karen talking about Valentine supposedly having some curse on it. He didn’t know about that, but Armadillo sure seemed like it was true.

“I don’t know.” He heard the weariness in her voice. “It’s peculiar, that’s for damn sure. Seen epidemics and all, and this one...yeah, you ain’t wrong. How fast it come on, how it’s hit the whole town? Something about it don’t sit quite right.”

“More things in Heaven and Earth, Miss Preacher’s Niece?” He couldn’t resist the reference, even as it felt strangely right. 

She raised an eyebrow. “I keep telling you, Arthur, them references really do a number on your ‘big dumb hick’ routine.”

“You want me to rethink that?”

“Not a bit.” She gave him a slight smile. “You just be who you are.”

He wished it was so easy as that, comfortable as that well-worn waxed canvas jacket of his. Still figuring out who and what he was, and that came before being who he was. But he was closer to it than he’d been for so long, so that was something. Tired as he was, dropping off to sleep came easily, and he had to admit Felipe was right. He’d needed the rest.

Sitting on the porch of the saloon as evening fell, drinking some fresh water and eating some canned fruit, they watched the last weak puffs of yet another dust storm settling in the streets. He heard a sad whine, and out of the alley came a dog. A mutt, just a half-grown pup by the look of him, still gangly-legged. He might be naturally dun, or it might be all desert sand caked into his fur. He looked at them warily, but with a bit of hope, tail giving a slight wag. Whether he’d been a stray all his life, or had his owner die or run off, clearly he’d been out on his own for a few days at least. Chances were he’d been somebody’s, that he would so readily approach people like this.

Sadie glanced at him, and put down her half-eaten dish of canned peaches. “Here, boy.” He gobbled them up in seconds. Dipping some clean water into the tin, Arthur watched him greedily lap it up. He glanced over at Sadie. She shrugged. “Anything that’s survived this far deserves some kindness.”

“We did mention getting a dog,” he said, not exactly joking, reaching up and cupping the dog’s muzzle in his hand, giving him a rub under the chin, watching those brown eyes half-close with pleasure at it. 

Sadie watched, and he heard the amusement in her voice when she said, “All right, mister, can’t let you in around the sick folk, but you stick around. Guess you’re coming with us when we leave. You’re gonna have a sister. Dido. She means well, but she’s gonna try to be the boss of you.”

“Needs a name, don’t he?”

She rubbed the dog between the ears, giving a rueful look as she held a hand up, covered thick with desert dust and grit. “Seems to me it’s gotta be ‘Dusty’, looking at that.” 

“Dusty it is.” Well, he’d missed having a dog around. Poor Cain--he still would never know for sure exactly what Micah did and how, but it obviously hadn’t been pretty. There was the part of him that wanted to hope the bastard had only chased the dog off for good with kicks and curses, but he couldn’t help but admit that felt naive. Chances were a cold-blooded snake like Micah had killed Cain just for the sport of it.

 _Should have trusted that dog more, Dutch,_ he thought wryly. _A dog’s usually right about folk. Cain never liked Micah, not one bit. Though none of us liked him. The women thought he was disgusting. Hosea and me kept saying he wasn’t to be trusted. Nobody could understand what in hell made you take him on and keep him around._ Guess it had been the asskissing, the flattering of Dutch’s almighty ego, that proved more important than about twenty people saying, to varying degrees of politeness, that they hated his guts and didn’t trust him to have their backs. _Did he go with you to whatever South Seas backwater you gone to ground in? You still listening to him whispering in your ear even now, Dutch? He sells you out to the Pinkertons in the end, I suppose it serves you right._ Though the thought gave him no pleasure all the same, only a weary sort of sadness that a man like that, brilliant and charismatic and passionate, who could have really been something spectacular, should amount to a hell of a lot of nothing. 

Wherever he was, Dutch was now what he’d always been, deep down. A gimcrack would-be petty king drunk on his own importance, surrounded only by his most devoted, shamelessly flattering sycophants. _And I should know. I was the most loyal of them for far too long._

“You look about a thousand miles away.” The situation was wearing on her, that was for sure. Normally she’d probably have touched him, given a playful nudge of her shoulder against his. He found he missed it, even as he chided himself that he ought not to worry about that. She was tired. He was tired. They were in the middle of a disaster here.

“That’d put me, what, about in St. Louis?” Pouring Dusty more water, then seeing the dog clamber onto the porch and obviously settle himself in, he looked down at his hands and sighed. “Just thinking. I went and fetched Jamie Gillis--Mary’s little brother--away from a bunch of Chelonians. He’d run away, joined up with them. And all the time, there I was, most devoted acolyte of another group of fanatics. The Church of Van Der Linde, and oh, did we have our god for sure, and did we love and fear and worship him. Giving him our tithes. Following his commandments. Listening to his little sermons like good boys and girls.”

“You ain’t--”

“No, I ain’t being sore with myself. Not exactly. Just thinking how funny it is, if someone had said that, I’d have called them full of bullshit. You’re in one of them things, it’s a fearful thing how you’re swept away in a current, how the _you_ of you is being washed away. You can’t see how caught you are, until either you drown in it or you’re safe on shore again.” 

“Well, you got yourself free. Done you best to get others out too.” 

Now she did lean into his shoulder, though he felt the weariness to it. “You need some more sleep?” he asked.

“No.” She looked at him steadily, though he saw a flicker of fear in her hazel eyes. “Well, yes. But way I’m feeling, I think you and Felipe are gonna be tending to me soon, though.”

Hearing her say it that calmly, it took him a second to take that in. He felt like he’d been punched. “What you mean?” He shook his head. “I don’t mean--I know what you mean. But what’s making you think that?”

“I got a headache. Stomach hurts. And it just don’t feel quite right.” At that, she leaned over and gagged, flipping up her bandana, but not vomiting just yet, only miserably heaving.

Heart pounding, he let himself have a few moments of wild panic. _Nope. Seriously, this ain’t happening._ This couldn’t be real. Whatever dark bastard was at work in this town couldn’t possibly let him struggle through all those months of TB and then casually kill Sadie with a snap of a finger. But then it passed. The fear was still there because he couldn’t lose her, but he got a tight rein on it. “All right. Let’s get you inside, get you somewhere to lie down. Start getting you drinking as much water as you can right now.”

“I can walk, Arthur,” she protested, as he got an arm around her. 

“Good for you. Count yourself lucky I ain’t carrying you,” he told her grimly. “Now shut up and save your strength.”

She gave a snort of irritated amusement, which relieved him. She was still feisty enough for that. “Pot, kettle.”

“Yeah, sure, a real pair we make.” He didn’t have to explain to Felipe. Walking in with Sadie leaning on him like that, the doctor understood at a glance. “I’m helping tend her,” he told the man, brooking no argument. “You ain’t handling all of them alone.”

“So be it,” Felipe said, giving no argument. “But for the love of God, let’s both be twice as careful with washing up and disinfection now.” 

It felt like the longest day and a half of his life, watching Sadie go from mildly cranky at being forced to lie down to helplessly wracked with the familiar spasms of diarrhea and vomiting. He’d seen some of them unable to weep at the pain and frustration because there wasn’t enough water in their bodies left to cry. She didn’t cry, but she cursed plenty, and he sure as hell wouldn’t tell her to do otherwise. 

He wondered sometimes in the middle of it if she’d as soon give up, be free of the struggle and the pain. Go be with Jake, at that. He couldn’t resent her that. He’d been prepared himself, exhausted and somehow both heartsick and hopeful, and just ready to be done. He’d done what he could to balance the scales and to save who he could, and all that was left was to face the end, and to let go.

But this wasn’t like that. He’d had a month to try to put some things in order, make his choices, make some amends. Charles hadn’t been wrong that having that time was a gift. It was a lot shorter than most TB patients, even, but far more than the few hours of strength and clear mind Sadie had before the cholera tightened its grip on her. She deserved better than that. If she wanted nothing more than to go be with Jake still, she could have done it any number of ways, and had tried to get herself killed plenty when she’d felt like that. To die now like this, when she’d made the choice to carry on and find a way to live, would be too cruel. She’d been ready to die. She wanted to live now.

Besides, he couldn’t lose her. Not because he loved her, but because she’d become the best thing in his life. Without her there, what was he? An aging man with a damaged body and damaged soul struggling to be something worthwhile in this world, that was all. 

So he found himself leaning in, brushing her hair back from her sweat-soaked forehead, telling her, “You keep fighting this, all right? You ain’t done yet.” Leaning in closer, and giving the urgent plea: “ _Please_.” Asking for it like he’d probably never asked for anything in his life. He’d never been much of a praying man, but the notion of Calderón’s loving and merciful God had grown on him somewhat, and she’d grown up believing, so he found himself silently praying, begging, arguing, berating, cajoling. _What’s going here ain’t none of yours, but she’s worth you fighting to keep her from it._

Maybe she heard him. Maybe she didn’t. Jesus. Was this what it had been like for those who gave a damn about him, watching him slowly fade out at Beaver Hollow? What a nightmare it must have been. Leaving her, even for a little while, was probably the hardest part, because there were others to tend, and a lucky few who’d rounded the bend and would survive, but were too weak still to do anything but sleep and drink and eat, and try to heal their battered, frail bodies. God, that was a familiar feeling. Tending them, tending to the horses, tending to Dusty still sitting on the porch hopefully, and at least Dugan came back and made another run with the corpse cart because he couldn’t bear to be away even a couple of hours at this point.

Two days passed in a blur, Felipe forcing him to go sleep, him forcing Felipe to go sleep, arguing that he had too many TB patients depending on him back in Mexico to risk burning himself out either.

Then, like the end of a thunderstorm, the calm descended. Nobody else had come in for over a day now, and those that were in the saloon were the ones past the crisis. Sadie ended up in an exhausted huddle near dusk last night, and it was so damn hard to tell if it was dazedly sleeping it off or sinking into a sleep from which there would be no awakening, but Felipe assured him it was the former. Of course it was. If anyone was strong enough to fight her way through this, it was Sadie Adler. So that quelled one fear in him at least. 

Sitting back against the bar in an exhausted huddle himself, taking a brief break, he eyed the room, fairly quiet now because everyone was either asleep, dead, or on the mend. The worst of the crisis had passed, but the backlash at the end here tried to take everything from him, and the fear that she still wouldn’t be OK lingered all the same. “How long they gonna take to recover?” he asked Felipe, sitting there beside him, nodding towards the five people besides Sadie still on their pallets. So few left, after all that, but perhaps he ought to be happy they’d managed to save anyone at all. Without Felipe there, it would have been nobody for sure.

“It’s much better than TB on that,” he said, making a bleak joke about that. “A few more days of bed rest and eating bland, easy to digest food, since that entire system’s pretty raw. That’ll get them up and about again, and able to do for themselves for the most part. We can leave then. But it’ll be a week or two of taking it easy to regain full strength.”

“Well, that ain’t so bad. Relatively speaking.” He reached up onto the bar and snagged a bottle of scotch, and opened it, offered it to Felipe first. “I think we’re both owed a drink at this point.”

Felipe let out an exhausted chuckle, taking the bottle and raising it briefly, tiredly, in salute. He took a drink, then handed it back. Arthur took his own swig, putting the bottle down between them. A few more drinks passed, and that helped. Neither of them would indulge nearly enough to get anything like drunk, given they might be needed, but taking the edge off and inducing a little mellowness onto their frayed and rattled nerves, that felt OK. “I’m glad she’ll be all right. It would have been a bitch of a thing for you to go through the TB recovery protocol and lose her. Maybe I shouldn’t have let you--”

“There wasn’t no ‘letting’ us, Felipe. You know that. We was gonna come help whether you said _sí_ or not.” He paused, took another drink, decided he deserved it for the scare he’d had. Compelled to honesty, he added, “And you might as well know. She ain’t my wife. My best friend, sure, but...”

Felipe reached for the bottle. “Really now.”

“We claimed we was married to travel to Mexico together without bother. Then when you talked about the convent, well, no point correcting it since they wouldn’t have let her stay otherwise. And I guess she needed that place as much as I did. Not just for the lungs, I mean. We both had a bad time of it before coming south. Las Hermanas, what you gone and built there--that’s something special.”

“Well, then I’m glad it did you both some good.” Felipe coughed at that drink. “Why are you telling me that, anyway?”

“Because I could lie to you when you was my doctor. Since then? Guess you’re my friend, and well, seems like I should be honest.” He couldn’t help a laugh. “Plus you keep _asking_ how things is between us in bed--”

“It’s purely professional--”

“I ain’t saying otherwise,” he said, holding up a hand, still laughing. “Yeah, sure, the good doctor wants to be sure I can manage the sheer strain you imagine that woman would put me through. She ain’t no delicate hothouse flower, after all. But Sadie, I never touched her. Never shall, I expect. We’re friends, no funny business, but that--it’s the best thing I’ve had in my life. Convent rules still, hey? And then you go and ask me about that fun I ain’t having with nobody, that gets me thinking about it, well, that’s nothing nice. Ain’t you doctors supposed be doing no harm?” He said it teasingly, but there was truth enough to it. Answering Felipe’s questions about it, awkwardly making up lies, had gotten to be a chore. God, maybe he had drunk a bit too much already, given his mouth was running away with him. He hadn’t drunk much at all in a year and a half now, so it seemed it got to him faster, because he could tell he was a bit tipsy already. Time to stop and let his head clear out.

Felipe shook his head, taking yet another drink, giving a low chuckle. “You’re one interesting man, Arthur. And whatever’s between you is your business and hers, but fine, I’ll stop asking about your intimate life.”

“Appreciate that.” 

Just then the doors swung open, and a man walked in, tall, with rapidly greying dusty-brown hair and beard. “You the folks who messaged from Chuparosa for the US Marshal?”

Caught tipsy in a saloon with a US Marshal staring right at him. Well, in different circumstances in the past, he’d be totally caught out and in trouble. As was, he’d have to play it as cool as he could, and definitely clear his head of the liquor. “Yeah, that’s us. You the marshal, I'm assuming?”

“Leigh Johnson.” The man’s pale eyes scanned the scene in the saloon. “Jesus. You ain’t kidding that it’s a mess around here. Sheriff just up and quit, huh?”

“Did at that.” Arthur shrugged. “Could be worse. Been, what, a full five or six days of peace and quiet on the _bandido_ front, Felipe, just about? Down in Nuevo Paraiso, that’s getting rarer.”

Johnson sighed, and crouched down in front of them. “Well, no getting a new sheriff in for a ghost town in a big damn hurry, so I suppose I’ll be here a while. How about you give me a drink of that,” he nodded to the scotch, “and catch me up on the situation.” Felipe handed him the bottle.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
“Pale horse, dark moon” Buell=pale, new moon?

“Followed by man in black until he claims the debt, choosing your past or your future” Hoping this ain’t about a bounty hunter or lawman after me. 

“Serpent sleeps but will wake again”. MICAH? DUTCH?

“Great heights are your crossroads, bring both good and bad” Guess I need to be more careful on mountaintops. Or maybe hot air balloons.

“Traveled far, will travel further yet”. Not that impressive as a piece of wisdom given I run into this guy across four or five different states now.

( **Sketch of Armadillo’s main street** captioned “ARMADILLO”)

( **Sketch of Dusty the dog** , captioned “Seems another stray orphan has adopted Sadie and me, or we adopted him. Guess some things ain’t changed from the gang, but maybe that notion was the best of us. We have an aim to calling him Dusty given the state we found him in.”)

( **Sketch of the saloon infirmary** , captioned “Lost the fight against the cholera more than we won it. The town will be years in recovering if it ever does. It makes for lonesome thoughts. But at least now a Morgan has done something good for Armadillo. Maybe I ain’t my father’s son. Not in the end.”

( **Sketch of Herbert Moon at the counter of his store** , captioned “The general store owner here is a particularly odious piece of work. Still sort of wanting to go steal something from his shop just in case I didn’t as a kid. Very petty notion on my part but then he’s all that’s petty, obnoxious, and close minded about America.”)

( **Sketch of the Strange Man** , captioned “Who is this dapper looking fella? Saw his picture in Moon’s store. Then I dreamed him here in the saloon, hovering over the suffering folk. Took a long look at Sadie that gave me this strange dread but he turned away in the end. I feel like I’ve seen him before, felt him leaning over me. Eyes like a shark, he had, all black and empty. My mind is likely just gone plain CRAZY with tiredness and worry, seeing bogeymen out of nothing, or remembering some nightmare. But something very strange is going on in this town. Gives me the creeps. Maybe they ain’t wrong about a curse.”


	19. Chuparosa I: A Pale Horse, A Dark Moon II

Things blurred in a hurry after sitting out on that porch and feeling the first spasms of retching coming on, head pounding and stomach bucking like a pissed-off horse. She remembered leaning on Arthur as she walked into the saloon, lying down, and then soon after that it all went crazy. 

Hearing the low sound of someone urging her to drink, holding a cup to her lips, and her body felt like a parched desert landscape, so she drank it down greedily, even lukewarm water feeling blissfully cool against her burning throat. How many times she did that, she didn’t know, but it felt endless. Maybe she simply never stopped.

Arthur--putting a wet cloth on her forehead, then his fingers brushing against hers, and his felt funny, too smooth, slick, soft. Anxious eyes above a faded red bandana, that blue-washed green like sunlit water. God, she needed water, she needed him, and she felt in that moment like if she didn’t have either there, she just might die. Him muttering all quiet and low, ”You fight this, you keep fighting” and that soft, almost broken “ _Please_.” Her throat and mouth, dry as sun-bleached bone, couldn’t seem to form the words right then but she wanted to say _I’m trying_. Maybe _I’m scared._ Maybe _Don’t go_ , because that shadow was there just on the edges of her vision, and it held back so long as he was there.

But he left, and the shadow came closer, leaned down to look at her. For a moment, she looked at him--it was a man, a dark-haired man--and thought, _Jake?_ But Jake never wore a top hat like that. She’d seen him unshaven often enough too, but never with a natty, almost primly shaped mustache like that. 

He looked down at her, this strange man, and he said nothing, and then finally he turned away. But he didn’t leave. He stayed there, lurking nearby, and she could feel it. She closed her eyes, and her gut spasmed again.

But now Jake really sat down beside her, reached for her hand. She looked at him. “‘’M sorry, Jakey,” she managed in a rough croak. “I…” 

“No need for talking, Sadie girl,” he answered her. “You been hurting enough already.” He gave her a soft smile, those familiar blue eyes crinkling at the corners. “I’m here, all right?” 

She wanted to ask if he was here for her to bring her with him, if he was here to say goodbye, or what, but it all faded before she could, slipping away like a leaf caught in the breeze. They visited her there, Felipe, Arthur, the dapper man in black, Jake, Tom Watkins, Laurie, Karen, Abigail, Henry, Caroline, so many others. A tiny dark-haired little boy who broke her heart--that son that Jake had so wanted? She couldn’t be sure who was real and who was a phantom of fever delirium, because they all felt no more or less real than each other. 

Then she’d opened her eyes and now the scorching pain was gone, but she felt wooden, numb, wrung out. Things slowly came back to her in time, like putting together the little pieces of a jigsaw puzzle. Cholera. Armadillo. Tumbleweed, before that, loss and guilt and hollowness. But she was too exhausted to do much more than open her eyes long enough to drink more water and swallow some oatmeal, and then close her eyes again, over and over.

“How long?” she asked Arthur finally as things cleared enough for her to want to know, as he helped her half-sit up enough to drink more easily without choking.

“You was sick for over two days. Damn near died. Been near two days since. Felipe says we should be able to head home tomorrow. Let you rest more there.” He gave her a small smile. “Least you’ll be back on your feet a lot quicker than I was.”

She glanced down at herself, realizing with some surprise that she was covered only by a thin cotton blanket, and she fumbled to catch it before it slipped further down her chest. “My clothes?” It came out a little more demanding than it should have. She’d helped strip the sick down to their underwear, given Felipe said them sweating in their clothes while losing so much water was sheer lunacy, and no need for excessive modesty on that. He’d only kept their underwear on them so they could wet it down against the fever if need be and help keep folks cooler longer than putting water on their bare skin. Though her camisole, drawers, and breastband had disappeared too, and that wasn’t something she’d done to any of the cholera victims she’d tended. 

“Got your shirt and pants off when you first got sick, just like all of them. The rest of it, drawers and whatnot? Got rid of that after your fever broke, did it for all of them who made it through. Burned that, the blankets you was lying on, all of it. Wasn’t gonna be stuff any of you’d ever want back, even if it didn’t need to get destroyed.”

She could imagine, given how stained and reeking peoples’ underwear got with fever-sweat, puke, and shit. But she couldn’t help but feel the heat rising in her face that had absolutely nothing to do with that departed fever. “Well,” she figured she might as well gamely make a joke about it, “Charles and me did get the clothes off you way back in Wapiti since otherwise you was gonna freeze. So I guess it’s only fair, you and Felipe doing it to me so I didn’t burn up.” Somehow pointing out Felipe being involved here, and Charles there, cut through some of the awkwardness. It shouldn’t be that strange. It wasn’t like he’d taken advantage of her fever to make some shitty excuse to get a peek at her. She hadn’t been thinking about anything like that back in Wapiti. Doing it to save someone’s life when they were sick and dying cut out almost anything except fear and determination. She didn’t even know if he cared to look at her bare body at all, given the chance. But the idea that now maybe she _wanted_ him to, though sure as hell in different circumstances than nearly dying, made her suddenly a bit shy about it. 

“Don’t worry,” he said, mischievous humor making his tone light and warm, “pretty sure in terms of wickedness, I been corrupted enough in my life that getting the clothes off a woman don’t even make a dent at this point.” 

Given he was damn near a choirboy in that particular area by his own account, she could argue that point, but it was better to just let it drop before it got her even more flustered. “Glad I don’t need to worry about being a wanton woman in addition to everything else.” Though she’d teased him in Wapiti about it, trying to make it less awkward for him. Probably just returning the favor, and that he could do it so easily told her that maybe no, he didn’t see her like that. But she wasn’t going to worry about that right now. There was no room for those thoughts in her exhausted brain.

By the next day, she was the only one left in the saloon, the only one with no place left to go here in Armadillo. The others would look after each other as best they could until those that had fled came back, and Marshal Johnson would help too, but both she and Arthur needed to rest, and Felipe had business back in Nuevo Paraiso. Not the least that the TB patients at Las Hermanas were expecting their usual appointment with _El Cactus_. 

She felt stronger, well enough to use some clean water to wash up again as best she could, putting on clean clothes from her saddlebag. Felipe outright refused to let her ride Bob back to Chuparosa, and given the short walk to his wagon tired her out, he had a point there. He was used to putting his foot down firmly with TB patients, making them slowly rebuild their weakened bodies over months and years. The notion of being down for the count for a week or so bothered her enough. Poor Arthur. She had more sympathy now. He’d borne that ordeal of his with more grace than he ought, given it had been over a year now since he’d been let off total bed rest and started that snail’s pace of a journey. He was close, but he still wasn’t back to where he’d been, if he ever would be.

Curled up in the bed of the wagon with Felipe’s supplies, Dusty beside her giving her palm a reassuring lick, she heard Arthur and Felipe talking up in the seats of the wagon, Arthur whistling to both Buell and Bob to follow. She drifted off to sleep again, lulled by the rumbling of the wagon on the southward road. Though she thought she saw the man in black one last time as they left town, standing on the porch of that saloon, and it sent a shiver down her spine. There was nothing natural about him, whatever phantom he was. 

She slept all the way back over Ramita De La Baya crossing the San Luis, and woke only with the sudden change in the wagon’s rhythm that she realized, groggily gathering herself together, was because they were all the way back in Chuparosa already. “You get yourself right back to bed,” Felipe said sternly. “The desert climate especially means resting up before you go pushing yourself again. You can get up for meals and the like, but you were tired already. I don’t want to see you out of the house for a week at least.”

“Well, at least you can eat proper, sit up to read, and whatever,” Arthur said, raising his eyebrows and giving a slight shrug. That stifled some of her instinctive, annoyed protest. She could hardly complain about a week of resting up and staying home when he’d been stuck in bed lying there like a log for damn near everything for three months, between both lungs. She still felt the clench in her jaw as she nodded, unable to say much about it.

Felipe nodded. “I’m off to see to the wagon, and get some sleep. Then Las Hermanas in the morning.” He glanced over at Arthur. “Come see me at my office tomorrow night and I’ll get your pneumothorax session done here.” He usually preferred to get them done at Las Hermanas, given that his setup and equipment for TB treatment was better there than the rudimentary essentials he kept in town, and Arthur gave him a questioning glance. “It’ll take a little longer since it’s the older apparatus, but you’ve got enough to keep you busy here this week.”

“Fine by me,” Arthur told him, as Sadie wearily scooted off the wagon, standing there, watching Felipe trudge towards the stables, obviously exhausted. She couldn’t blame him, given how hard he’d worked over these last days. She didn’t doubt Arthur had done more than was good for him, particularly after she’d gotten sick, but Felipe had carried the brunt of it throughout. 

“A long, private appointment getting screwed by The Cactus, and not a penny earned from it,” Arthur deadpanned, and she managed a laugh at that. “All right, let’s get you upstairs.” He got an arm around her shoulders, and she felt him stoop, scooping her up with his other arm behind her knees, easily as if she weighed nothing.

She glanced up at his face, startled. “Arthur, what are you--”

“It’s this, throwing you over my shoulder like a sack of oats, or letting you struggle for five minutes to get up them stairs and me holding you up so you don’t fall flat on your face.” He shook his head. “Can’t we just skip that?”

It was that pride, and really it wasn’t, because suddenly a lot of it was him carrying her like this, held close against him. He carried her inside, and up the stairs to their room, and she couldn’t help but think of Jake scooping her up like this, carrying her up the stairs of another house in the desert that night they’d finally decided to leave. The two moments and two men started to blur together like her fever dreams had, Arthur and Jake, and she felt the guilt and panic beating at her like frenzied wings as she worried that memory of Jake was slipping away, being overwritten. Everything scraped raw within her, she couldn’t help it, not sure whether she was yelling or begging or both, “Put me _down_.”

He did, though he’d made it upstairs already, and she gratefully managed the few steps to the bed herself, sitting down heavily. Feeling that tight sensation in her throat, the burning at the back of her eyes, and hearing him say, voice oddly quiet and awkward, “I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to…well, you want anything, you just tell me.” Retreating and carefully taking the harsh rebuke as his due, and of course he did, Dutch had taught him to be his loyal dog for years and years, and even now he expected no better, even from her. After he shut the door, she wanted to go after him, but there were no words in her right then to explain even to herself, let alone to him. 

_You are one mean, miserable bitch, Sadie Griffith._ It was all she could manage to get her boots off and collapse on the bed, and the cholera might have tried to get all the water out of her body, but she found she’d gotten back enough for tears. She wasn’t sure whether it was for herself or Jake or Arthur or maybe all of it at once and more besides, but something within her broke to the point she couldn’t take it. Exhausted and wrung out, she slept after that, dreaming more of those troubled dreams. 

She woke to Arthur knocking politely on the open door, like some stranger. “It’s your room too, you know,” she said tiredly, “you don’t have to--” Shook her head at that, because she’d been the one to knock him back on his heels like this, and it wasn’t his fault. What feelings she had were her problem. “Arthur. Honey. I don’t know what came over me there, but--” God, what a feeble lie, but she couldn’t say the truth when she didn’t even know exactly what that was right now herself. “Guess I was just pissed off at being so helpless.”

He came closer, sat down in a chair. “Know how that feels,” he said. “Think there wasn’t days when I hated seeing everyone who could go do all them normal things? Wanted to throw things, I did. But I know it is, when you’re struggling so hard, and a little bit of pride means more than you can say. I shouldn’t have...”

“You startled me, that’s all. I shouldn’t have taken a snap at you like that, though.”

“All right, then. But you done plenty for me though, all them months. You’re still doing too much to make up for when I can’t.” He reached out, and that moment of hesitation before he touched her arm just about broke her heart, as did the pleading look in his eyes. “Just let me look after you this time.”

As ever, he hoped for so little--to be allowed to care for her, to not be sent away. That part of her that she couldn’t ignore now that wanted him to ask for a whole hell of a lot more than that suddenly ached. She had better get a grip on things, and soon, because otherwise she would lose him entirely by doing something stupid. She didn’t know, might never know, whether he was meant to be anything else besides a friend, but she knew that lay between them for certain. To lose a true friend like him would be a loss she couldn’t bear. “All right. Thank you.” She made sure she met his eyes, smiled. “You’re a better friend than I deserve.” Things settled within her heart a bit at that. They’d be OK. She’d figure it out, and whatever turmoil she had going on, she wasn’t going to hurt him with it. She swore that to herself with ironclad determination. If the time came for her to try to untangle all these threads she let get so messy, she’d make sure he knew none of it was his fault, that she only wanted to make sure he was free to be with someone he did want.

Two days passed, sleeping, drinking until she felt like a balloon about ready to burst, getting up to go eat out on the rooftop, reading out there and getting some sun. Slowly healing, slowly gathering her strength back to her, physically anyway. Trying hard to gather that inner strength back too, but everything was so scattered and shattered that it felt like a hopeless task. It wasn’t exactly the bleak despair she’d known in those first days in Horseshoe Overlook, but there was that same dazed sense of _What am I gonna do now?_

Arthur had left to go deal with gentling some horses at the stable. Couldn’t do hunt a bounty or the like--he held to their deal that they rode together, and that was that. But he still did some of those other jobs around town to pick up some money. Better that he stayed in town anyway, given he’d gotten a session with The Cactus the night before. He’d slept on a pallet in the small extra bedroom, to judge from things, so she could rest undisturbed.

She sat there with Dido curled up on her lap, and Dusty, a shiny bronze-brown now that Arthur had given him a bath, lying there with his head on his paws, obviously contented. The difference between herself at Horseshoe and now here in Chuparosa finally dawned on her. Back then, she’d been waiting to die, hoping for it. She’d told herself since then that she aimed to keep living, true, but when it came to the cholera, she’d genuinely fought. Not out of the notion of living for those that couldn’t, either, or to make amends for things she’d done. She’d wanted to live, and that thought was both troubling and reassuring all at once. _Jake, was that you coming to take me away? I guess I wasn’t ready just yet._ Did it mean she loved him less that given the choice, she’d fought to stay rather than to go? Like the recognition she wouldn’t be buried with him and its implications, she still wasn’t sure that she had that answer.

But all the same, the flame of that will to live seemed to burn all the brighter now. She could make herself be sorry for plenty of things, but not for that one. 

That afternoon, she had a visitor. She was downstairs, eating an orange, washing some dishes--she wasn’t a complete invalid, Goddamn it--when she knock came at the door. Answering it, she saw Calderón there. “I heard that you’d been ill.”

“Well, I suppose it’s part of the duties of folks of the cloth to comfort the sick, ain’t it?” she joked awkwardly.

“I’d like to think you and I have a bit more between us than duty,” Calderón told her, voice mild. “Besides, I was in town already to speak with Pedro about the wedding, so you needn’t feel guilty wondering if I made a trip just for this.”

She was having a hell of a time of it doing her best towards pushing friends away, wasn’t she? “Course not. You’re welcome here anytime, and you know that.” She gestured Calderón in. “Arthur’s out, though. Working.”

“Probably the best thing for him. I expect he’d fuss over you non-stop if you let him.”

Calderón knew the man too well. “He would at that.” She sat down at the kitchen table, gesturing to the chair across from her. “Coffee?” She’d gained a taste for it Mexican-fashion, with cinnamon and sugar, since they’d been down here.

“Please.” She poured a mug, setting it down in front of the black-clad Mother Superior.

“How’s the wedding going, anyway?”

“Fairly well, now that Juanita’s formal release from her vows finally arrived. They’re both very excited, of course.”

She couldn’t help but smile at that. “Good for them. Bet you’re gonna be baptizing a kid of theirs within a year.”

“Well, perhaps Father Raúl in Escalera. I’m permitted to conduct marriages and baptisms. without a priest regularly here, but it’s always going to be preferred that a priest do it. Giving dispensation for nuns performing any church ceremonies is a bit of a grey area. No nun can ever give last rites, for example.” 

Sadie held her tongue on having an opinion on that. Aside from a few exceptions like the Quakers who held that nobody was spiritually really in charge, it wasn’t like any other church exactly hurried to let women preach or hold any kind of holy authority either. They just made it a discouraged impossibility rather than a formal ban. She’d give the Catholics this much--at least they were open about it. “I ain’t sure it matters. You’re there and you comfort the dying all the same. Usually it’s the women who are there at the very last, whether any church doctrine--and I mean Protestants too, mind--says that counts or not. Was women who went to Jesus’ tomb first, at that. So I think God sees what you do.”

Calderón laughed at that. “I always enjoy how your mind works. I think you’d have made a very interesting theologian.”

“We used to debate it around the table sometimes with my Uncle Will.” She smiled at that memory. “I swear, every time he tried to argue using St. Paul--but those were good days, all the same.” Gone now, along with the house, but Arthur wasn’t wrong. The memories stayed, and those were sweet. “Anyway, Juanita and Pedro, they’re getting a late start, true, but I’d say that’s gonna make them appreciate having each other all the more.” Given Juanita was nearly thirty-five, Pedro forty-one now, they might not have the greatest span of years together.

“Well, you would understand that, given you had to hold off.”

“I suppose I would. Both from the waiting, and making the most of the time you got.” She took another sip of coffee, trying to settle her mind. “Just hoping they get a hell of a lot longer than Jake and me got. Get to have kids and the like too.”

But it felt OK to say that, given Calderón would understand. She’d been a bride, a wife, a mother, and lost all of it. She’d been through that darkness of having everything ripped away in an instant. Somehow it felt like luck or God or something to have her here, come to check in on a friend. She’d always been good with the advice, and if nothing else, another widow had to have some kind of wisdom about all of this. “You still keeping informal confessional, then?” She said it as light in tone as she could, trying to sound casual, but really, that wasn’t going to fool Calderón.

It didn't. “Of course.”

“You was widowed. Had your man die a hard death, while you was still young enough. But you become a nun instead. Why ain’t you remarried? Did you just never want another man? Like--” She paused, trying to find the words. “Was it that no man was ever gonna measure up to Julio, and so love wasn’t worth the bother? Or was it that you just couldn’t never think how you could explain to him someday how he got replaced? Some other man in your bed, fathering your kids, being buried by your side. Trying to tell him how you...you was everything to him, but in the end, you didn’t love him enough, that you loved this other man more.”

Calderón looked at her, warmth and affection shining bright in those dark eyes. “Oh, my dear. There’s no need to hurt yourself like this.” She reached over, put her hand over Sadie’s. “It wasn’t that I couldn’t ever replace Julio. When I came out of the darkness, I found that love readily filled my heart all the same, and helped heal it. It was a different love than than for a husband, that’s all, and it put me on a different path. But love--love is a miracle. Maybe the greatest miracle. It grows and it multiples, like the loaves and fishes, so that we can love each other, in so many ways. We aren’t meant to live our lives without love. If that love is for another husband, so be it. There’s no ‘more’ or ‘less’ in how you loved Jake.”

Hearing that helped, soothing some of the pain, but easy as it would be to try to absolve herself with that, she couldn’t. “It just...don’t feel right. Me maybe having all that, having a good life, and Jake got so little.”

“If you had died, would you want to see him turn away from love, if he felt it again?”

“No.” 

“Then believe if he loved you as much as you loved him, he’d want to see you happy.” She sat back in her chair, brows furrowed in thought. “Arthur, I assume?” Sadie nodded. “That does make things easier and more complicated at once.”

“Easier than if it was someone else, I suppose,” she acknowledged. “But yeah, if he don’t feel that way, things get strange between us.”

“If he doesn’t feel that way, or if it’s for someone else, can you be happy being his friend?”

“Of course. We been plenty happy as friends, until I figured out I felt like that. But he’s been hurt so much, by folk who used him and called it love. I don’t...I don’t want to take something from him that he’d give only because I want it, and he wants to be wanted, not because he does want it himself. He’d do about anything for me, and that’s the trouble. If that makes any damn sense at all.”

“It does. And you’re right about him. He’s more vulnerable than most men in that, I suppose, and you don’t want to be unequally yoked. I also think you need to give yourself more time to heal. You just realized that feeling exists. Don’t rush into anything while you’re still grieving.” She smiled at Sadie again, a broad, comforting sort of a smile. “Passion is very fine, but love _grows_ , child. That takes time, and care. You’ve already had love grow between you, and if that sort of love is meant to grow too, it will. Trust in that.” 

That did help, easing the pressure tying her guts into knots. They’d be OK. She would try to work through that mountain of all those feelings about Jake and his dying and the life they’d never have, and see what she could do with it. When the time came, she’d maybe try to give him a hint on things, and see if he picked that up and did anything with it. That would tell her better if he wanted that too. It wasn’t her usual style, but she thought she could manage something careful without resorting to being a meek china doll, all coy fluttering eyelashes and demure words. However it went, she would be a good friend to him, and be glad to have a man like him in her life. 

She looked over at Calderón, grateful for the greater peace suddenly within her. “Thank you, _Madre_.” She couldn’t resist asking, almost guiltily, “He ain’t said anything to you, has he?”

She met Sadie’s eyes, and gave away nothing with her gaze. “If he had, I wouldn’t say. That would be his to tell you. Just like I wouldn’t tell him what you told me today, but perhaps I’d encourage him to say it to you instead, when he was ready.” She read between the lines of that well enough, particularly with Calderón telling her to take more time rather than go rush to find him and confess everything she felt. Sounded like he hadn’t said anything, but she’d help Sadie out if he did, as much as she could without directly meddling and betraying confidences. Not knowing was good and bad. It gave her more time to figure things out, rather than feeling the pressure herself of knowing he wanted that, but the uncertainty remained. 

Coffee dishes done and Dusty and Dido fed, she went back to the reading after Calderón left. Arthur had heaped a whole pile of books on her, far more than she could hope to read in a week or so of something like half-rest, half-normal life. She suspected he’d remembered being bored out of his wits at Las Hermanas in those long months, and instinctively gone and bought reading based on that. Somehow she couldn’t help but smile at the excess, sweet as the gesture was. Never mind she wouldn’t be able to read it all before she was ready to get back in the saddle, and on another job. This gave her the luxury of choices, and they’d work their way through the pile all the same in the months to come.

She’d read enough tragedy and the like. She’d _lived_ enough tragedy. Maybe she was in the mood right now for something light, hopeful, even a little frivolous. So when she flipped open the books, one called “Sunset Over the Red Sage” looked to be like the sort of perfectly purple and perfectly silly romance she’d always secretly enjoyed, all pirates and dashing noblemen and bandits and whatever else, full of high drama and dreadful dialogue. They’d passed these kinds of books around camp, all of them except for Mary-Beth pretending they didn’t enjoy them half so much as they did. 

Jake had always laughed and humored her reading them, though she knew he’d never read them for himself. She figured in a rough life as a farmer, she was entitled to a few guilty pleasures. Arthur couldn’t have known that, but apparently he’d happened onto just the right thing all the same. Though to judge from the stack, he’d probably just told Esteban to give him everything new--ridiculous man. 

Though as she started reading, the writing was indeed overly gloriously ornamental and overwrought, but she couldn’t see the book as merely some deliciously sinful treat. 

Adam Miller: outlaw, killer, and thief, with the sad, soft, dreaming soul of an artist, hopelessly in love with the wealthy Margaret who snubbed him as too coarse, loved hopelessly by the young pickpocket Melanie, who he treated as a kid sister. Dramatic speeches by Daniel Wallingham, the outlaw gang’s leader. 

It was a carefully blurred copy, set thirty years ago out in Arizona and with so many names changed, events made up or erased, but she could see the influencing forces there all the same. She looked at the spine, reading the author’s name aloud. “Well, well, Leslie Dupont, nice to meet you.”

“Who now?” Arthur came out onto the roof then, Dusty frisking eagerly at his heel, to the point Arthur had to dance aside from the overly delighted dog or else risk tripping over him. “Whoa, boy.”

She glanced up at him, turned to a page towards the end that she hadn’t reached yet, and scanned it. Yes, this seemed to make it even more obvious, and if there had been even a shred of doubt, it was gone now. 

“ ‘Adam looked at James, his eyes sad and tired with the weight of so many cruelly dashed dreams, the pain of being a bringer of suffering and death such as he never should have been. He was too fine to be put to a use so coarse, but loyal he had been, always, above everything, and foolishly trusted where he ought not to trust. His self-proclaimed father, his grotesque god, Daniel Wallingham, still held his soul in his tight-fisted grip. It mattered not at all how ill unfortunate Adam now was, how terrible his struggle to carry on, let alone to shoulder the fearsome burden that Daniel would place upon him. All that had ever been good in Daniel had fled as the increasing delusion and paranoia came upon him. He would squeeze until there was nothing left of a noble man, and then discard Adam as carelessly as another man would throw away the gnawed-down core of an apple, with neither thought nor care, if Adam should survive so long. “You should run,” Adam told James. “You have a wife who loves you above anything, a son that you know now how much you ought to cherish and protect in all his innocence. Jim will be a better man than any of us, I expect. You and Annabeth and Jim can still find a good life away from all this madness and death. This thing here is pretty much done. I’m not certain it ever really existed, except in our own deluded minds.” James stared at him, aghast at the idea of abandoning a man who he considered his own brother.’ Sound a bit familiar to you, Arthur?“

He stared at her, a look of incredulity on his face. “Yeah, the sentiment sounds real familiar, though gotta say, the English is better than mine.” He crossed over to the table, putting down a plate, and taking the book from her hand where she offered it to him. He traced the title and the letters on the red leather spine. “I’ll be damned. Good on you, Mary-Beth Gaskill. A published writer, no less, and not no penny dreadful at that!” She smiled at the sudden pride in his voice. “Esteban said the thing came out just over a month ago and it was selling well already, and that’s why he ordered it.” 

“We could write her at her publisher, if you was so inclined. Let her know you made it out alive at least.” And though she’d never seen anything to indicate Arthur saw her as anything but a kid sister, just like Adam, maybe if that was meant to be she ought to give it a chance. 

He thought about it a moment, then shook his head, still smiling slightly to himself. “No. She’s making a life for herself away from all our bullshit. Good for her. No need to drag her back in with an old ghost showing up. There ain’t nothing Mary-Beth needs from me. Better that she do her best to move on and forget.” He hefted the book in his hand, then gently put it down on the table. “I’m guessing this was her way of saying goodbye to all of us and dealing with what happened in ‘99. Finer choice than the bottle, I’d say. So am I still dying of TB?”

“Wait, what?” The question took her aback. Of course he wasn’t. He was getting better. 

He pointed to the book. “My alter ego there.”

Now she understood. “Yeah, unfortunately. It does, of course, inspire poor Adam to be a better man.”

“You in it?”

She made a face. “Sophie Atkins, tragic new widow, at your service. Ain’t got to the point where I’d be putting on a gun and doing anything of use. Mostly I’m sitting around sobbing.” 

He shot her a look. “After what you been through, Sadie, nobody blamed you for it, or thought you was weak. Hell, the fact you survived three days with them miserable bastards--” He shook his head, giving her a look of gentle admiration. “Any of us who run up against O’Driscolls knew that meant you was tough.”

“I’m just glad I...that I come a long way from being that woman.” Reading that version of herself, Sophie was both too close and unfamiliar all at once. Sophie was her, at least Mary-Beth’s view of her, and she could see the shape of herself there so clearly, remembering those days at Horseshoe Overlook. But she was someone far different from that woman rendered helpless, her paralyzing grief and suffering turned into the all-encompassing whole of her existence. _I love you still, Jake Adler. But guess in the end I gotta find a way to be something more than Sadie Adler, widow, don’t I?_ “We’ll see if poor Sophie dies tragically.” Mary-Beth would have had every reason to expect Sadie wouldn’t survive to see 1900, when she’d left. 

“Reckon Adam does for sure. Mary-Beth left before the end, as well she should, but she knew I wasn’t expecting to survive.”

“I didn’t read that far yet. I’ll save that for another day.” When she felt better able to handle it, because a light and funny read had turned damn serious in recognizing what lay behind the story. She looked then at the plate he’d put down, at the half-moon shaped pastries there. “What’s this, then? You brung me some empanadas? Sweet of you.”

He pulled out the other chair and sat down. “Rosita don’t know how to make _pies_ exactly, so that’s what she could teach me. Suppose it counts as a pie, just about.”

“Wait, you made that?” She reached for one, feeling the flaky crust still warm, and bit into it, eyes going wide in astonishment. “Cherry? Where the hell was you able to find--” There were no cherries to be found here in Mexico, for love or money.

“They had some dried ones at the general store up at MacFarlane’s. Aimed to save that for your birthday, but I figured you could do with something nice about now.” 

Ridiculous man, indeed. Saying it like it was nothing that he’d bought the damn cherries, learned to make some sort of pie, and all to cheer her up. Those dried cherries must have cost enough besides. “Arthur…”

“I wasn’t there baking them empanadas all day, I swear.” He gave her a sly grin. “Ain’t got flowers in my hair neither. Guess I ain’t a good little wife.”

Moved by some mischievous impulse, she stood and went to the corner of that rooftop patio, to where they kept the pots with the plants, herbs and a few flowers for the enjoyment of the color. She’d grown up in the desert, so she knew full well that every year, they came to life in vivid color, and her mother had kept her pots of plants, and so too would she. She reached down into a pot with the desert honeysuckle, currently blooming. _Chuparosa_ , the plant they’d named this town for. Plucked one of the blossoms, shading from buttercup yellow through burnt ochre, and went back to him. Tucked it neatly behind his right ear, the fiery hues standing out against that dark caramel hair of his, and grinned right back at him. “Maybe not. But I'm a lucky woman, you know. You’re the best friend I could ask for, always.” He needed to hear that, until he believed it. That would always be good enough, and if they ever had anything further than that, she’d count herself a woman blessed beyond measure.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter to Caroline from Sadie**  
Dear Caroline,  
It makes me real happy to hear that you and Harold truly found your way to each other. The last thing I would want was for you to be trapped in a marriage that ain’t nothing but miserable, even if I might have imagined it a couple times in some self-righteous fit. That whole “I hope you’re happy with the choice you made, missy!” sort of thing, you know?

I went back to Tumbleweed a little over a week ago. The farms are gone. Banks cleared the land and it sits barren and forlorn. I visited the graves, left flowers for Momma. I will visit sometimes when I can, but it seems we was both right in the end to leave. There ain’t nothing left that either of us could have made a good life from. I think Momma and Daddy would agree with that in the end. They left land and farms in Pennsylvania themselves to seek a better life, after all. I forgot that for too many years.

We passed through Armadillo, my friend and me, and ended up helping out with a cholera epidemic there. I caught the disease. Damn near died of it but it seems I ain’t done with this world just yet. But brushing close to death like that made me think about some things, and it ain’t never helped neither of us to keep our mouths shut. We used to be able to tell each other just about everything. So I will tell you what I can.

I know them FUCKING O’Driscoll Boys, sister. I won’t ask pardon for the language, because you and me never did need to pretend to girlish delicacy. It was them who broke into me and Jake’s home, and killed him. Kept me alive for three days. You can imagine the rest. A woman don’t need it spelled out.

I got them back in the end. Killed my share of them. Watched their leader hanged. They ain’t never gonna hurt folk ever again, trust me on that.

I guess that last paragraph maybe startled you. But you wanted to know the truth and so be it. It was outlaws who took Jake from me. It was other outlaws who saved my life and took me in. I ran with them a few months. I did my share of killing, O’Driscolls mostly. I didn’t kill innocent folk, I can say that much. What happened found the anger in me and determination to not be just another woman in this world turned into a victim of bad men. I ain’t proud of everything I done in that time, but I am myself again, trying to be good and kind, even if some things in me have changed. I can’t go back to who I was, not entirely. I’m a woman who can kill people now. But I can draw lines that need to be drawn. If I’m killing folk it will be only to protect the innocent, not with bitterness and vengeance in my heart. 

You may notice I have not said which gang it was that took me in. You always was clever so perhaps you can puzzle it out yourself, but I won’t tell you more unless you want. Though if you are too horrified by me or would rather not know as you feel it would obligate you to turn me into the law, I understand that. 

Maybe I shouldn’t have written even that much but thing is, we had enough of not speaking plainly, and if you would rather we not speak again then that’s that, though please at least better than I done five years ago and do me the courtesy of writing your goodbye. But I would rather we walk away from each other in honesty rather than me keep you by lying to you in half-truths.

So truth is that I am going by “Griffith” again because in a harried moment I loaned the name to that friend I told you about, and for both of us, the name’s stuck. Yes, he rode with that gang. Did some awful things. But that was never the man he wanted to be, and it was only his loyalty to that man who raised him since he was a kid that held him that long, until he finally saw sense and fought to stop the madness of it. He holds himself accountable for all of it, and always will. It’s hard to put it out there in a letter and make it sound real rather than some craziness. If you met him, you would see it. He ain’t the sort neither to tuck away in some quiet place, pretend away what he done, and claim that just not doing bad anymore is enough. He’s trying to do good in the world. He finally has a chance to be the fine man he always was inside, and it suits him. 

He’s gentle and kind now that he can let himself be, rather than being told all he is good for is brutality on command. Caro, I swear, he can’t walk through town here without stopping and giving the local kids some centavos for candy. Says they’ll have to grow up quick enough, and they might as well enjoy harmless little pleasures while they can. That sweet fool learned to bake a pie for me to cheer me up after the cholera. Don’t sound like the sort of thing a mean ol’ bandit would do, does it? You know me for a sensible sort. Maybe too sensible. No concerns that I been hoodwinked by some charming rogue. “Silver tongued” ain’t high on the list of words I would use to describe him.

He’s stayed by me through all of my own struggles. And don’t think I don’t know what you was implying with that pert little “you write some warm words” of yours, Caro. Yes, I love him. No, he don’t know it yet. I still got my share of letting go of Jake to do before we maybe talk about all that.

I do treasure that picture of you, Harold, and the kids. You do look happy, and I pray you all continue to be so. 

Hoping I ain’t horrified you too much with this letter,  
Sadie 

**Letter to Bonnie from Sadie**  
Bonnie,  
We made it back to Chuparosa finally. I expect folk at your place have heard the situation in Armadillo is a dire one. It come up so fast you hadn’t even heard while we was there, but we found it all the same on our way back from Tumbleweed. 

Arthur and me brought back the doctor here in Mexico that I found back in ‘99 for his TB. Armadillo was hell on earth. Glad you and your family wasn’t there for it. You’ve suffered and lost enough already. 

The town will be a loss for a while, and I expect until it recovers them Del Lobos will be all over it like maggots feeding on a dying animal. If you need anything you can’t get at your own store, best you go to Blackwater for a while.

Take care of yourself, and write me here if you would. Hope that we get up to Hennigan’s Stead again sometime this year to visit you and your pa. Arthur is of a mind to find some good horses out in the desert, since you mention a need for them. (Told you, find yourself a man who’s sweet to horses.) Perhaps that would make reason enough. Or if Drew would be amenable, you’d be welcome to come south of the border to visit us for a time, if the ranch can spare you. I know how that life goes. 

Fond regards,  
Sadie Griffith


	20. Chuparosa I: Justice Of A Peculiar Kind I

“We got a letter,” Sadie told him, after having checked the post office while he scanned for new bounty posters.

“What you mean ‘we’ got a letter?” He couldn’t help but question it, given most times it was folks writing one or the other of them. Even someone like Charles who wrote them both tended to write two separate letters.

“As in a personal missive that looks addressed to you and me both,” she replied with excessive patience, and a bit of a sparkle in those hazel eyes of hers.

“I don’t need sitting in a schoolroom to know what ‘we’ means, Sadie, and you know what I’m asking.”

She read the name on the envelope. “Julia Machado, out in Casa Madruga.” She glanced up at him, tilting her head aside slightly in a questioning gesture.

“Name don’t ring a bell, I’m afraid. Guessing it’s someone who heard about what we done at the Christmas fiesta and needs some helping.”

She tore open the envelope, and scanned the paper. “You got the right of it, just about. Says she needs our help in a ‘personal matter’ and that she’ll pay.”

Something tugged at his memory, though. “Casa Madrugada--out in Diez Coronas, yeah? On the train line, so we went through there on our way to Chuparosa back when we first come down here.”

“Your memory’s better on it than mine. Though I was worrying about other things that morning.” From her glance at him, he understood full well that her “other things” consisted almost entirely of making sure he didn’t keel over.

“Rough town, from what I remember seeing.” He’d tiredly stumbled off the train to take a piss, so he’d caught at least a bit of the town. “You learn the look of a place that ain’t got no law pretty quick. There’s a certain feel about it.” Tension in the air ready to snap like a too-taut wire, like a pack of crazy and bloodthirsty mutts held in check just barely. Places like that, just about anything seemed possible. “And with it having a name like Casa Madrugada, well, you know what that usually means.”

“I ain’t quite sure I’m following.”

He gave a discreet cough, trying to not let it turn into a laugh. Straightforward and earthy as she was, he still forgot sometimes that she’d spent almost her life as an honest farmer, rather than his decidedly more checkered past. It was kind of fun to find moments where she was naive as a schoolgirl. “You see any ‘House of the Rising Sun’ or ‘Dawn House’ or the like, names like that tend to be brothels and gambling hells. Opium den too, sometimes. Places they’re hoping to keep you sticking around till dawn.” 

“Brothel _and_ gambling hell? That’s dangerous for a fella’s wallet.”

“Get screwed upstairs, and get screwed downstairs. Your choice in which order,” he joked. Hosea had made some joke all those long years ago, the night they’d met, that gamblers and pimps or madams weren’t all that different, selling people on flimsy dreams.

She laughed at that. “Well, I suppose if this is the madam, I’d worry more if she was just asking for you. She wants a fella and his wife both, she ain’t got no funny business in mind.”

He couldn’t resist teasing her about it now. “Oh, I ain’t so sure about that. ‘Personal business’ she’ll pay well for? Might be she’s looking to have some kind of private audience with the both of us.”

She gave him that sharp-edged look again. “Don’t you go talking circles around me.”

Another one? Might be a good day. “Ah, you sweet little sheltered farm gal. See, there’s always that sort who wants three people all in the same bed. Fellas with some filthy dream about screwing two women at once.” The working girls in Frisco had joked about it often enough, but if a man was willing to pay, fine by them.

She thought about that, and he could almost see the wheels turning in her mind, puzzling that out. He tried to not laugh, seeing the beet-red flush creeping into her cheeks. Though in usual Sadie fashion, she charged right in once she got over the initial stunned moment. “How the hell’s that even work, one man thinking he can handle two women? Most fellas can’t even satisfy one woman, let alone two. Though I reckon a man who’s paying ain’t interested in pleasing them, he’s interested in getting his, so he ain’t gonna be doing nothing but humping away anyway. Plus men do the business, then they’re done for a while. Even longer as they get older, from what I seen. So gotta say, I don’t see the sense in it.”

“Well, I ain’t gonna argue,” he answered her dryly. “We menfolk are a sorry lot on that account in general, and no, age might improve some things in a man, but it don’t improve that.”

“Though I guess if it’s a woman doing the asking, two women and one man, that makes more sense.” She got that thoughtful look on her face again. “If she likes men and women both, sure--though one woman and two men, that could work just fine too.”

For not even being aware of the notion of three people together about a minute ago, she certainly threw herself into analyzing the whole thing with enthusiastic curiosity. How in hell he’d ended up in this one, he didn’t know. Though from that whole talk they’d had where Benji and Laura came up, maybe she had other thoughts, other desires, she hadn’t let herself imagine all these years. “That’s your kind of thing?” he ventured hesitantly.

She gave him a look, teasingly batting her eyelashes in a way that looked absurd on her, obviously taking it to the point of overacted dramatics. The low coo of her voice confirmed it, a tone like he’d never heard from her, as fake on her as any mask would be. “What, Arthur darling, you wanna bring home some strapping fella for both of us to have some fun? Or would you rather it be a pretty gal?” 

Something shifted uncomfortably within him, not quite sure what she was getting at with this. Was she just having nonsensical good fun, or gently mocking him somehow, or was this an actual genuine offer, kindly meant if misguided, to find him someone to share his bed? There was a purposefulness to those jokes, and maybe the fact she was so flippantly commenting about that meant she’d started thinking and feeling like that again. So maybe she wasn’t done, not with passion, and maybe not with love either. He wished her better joy of it than he’d found, given that being woken up again like that once he’d clawed his way back far enough from the edge of dying had brought him nothing but the dull gnawing pain of impossibility.

God help him, it wasn’t Mary he saw anymore in those sweet and aching dreams where he was loving someone, like it had been for so many years, and even more intensely after seeing her in Valentine. Wasn’t Mary he saw anymore those times he gave in to lonely longing frustration and just took care of business himself, closing his eyes and wishing the hand touching him wasn’t his own. Wasn’t Mary he saw anymore in those soft, silly dreams of a home, family, finally knowing that he belonged somewhere and to someone. It hadn’t been Mary for months now, and he could tell himself over and over he needed to root out that sickness before it took him over, but it had. Sadie stayed there, branded into his heart and soul all the same. _You’re the only one. Cause if it was you and me, I couldn’t never want nobody else._ It was right there, on the tip of his tongue, but he couldn’t just make himself say it. Couldn’t look her in the eyes and say it, and see how he’d wrecked things by wanting too much. “No, don’t much need to be some aging fool making a jackass of myself like that. But I did mean it. Someone catches your fancy, man or woman, I sure ain’t gonna stand in your way.”

She looked at him for a long moment, something he couldn’t quite read in her eyes. “Same to you. You deserve a nice gal--or fella--if that happens.”

Truly fine of her to carry some hope for his sake, but it wouldn’t happen. He knew himself far too well for that. “Anyway, all fun aside, if this Miz Machado is the madam, she ain’t interested in taking either of us for a ride. Running a business, she is, so she’ll have some kind of genuine work proposition. Needing information on someone, maybe, or running protection for the working gals.”

“Handled that, among your other talents?”

“Had to make a living,” he said with a slight shrug, “and we couldn’t do it all by robbing. Times was we done at least as much honest work--or mostly honest, anyhow--as the other sort. So we going, or not?”

“Appeals more than chasing more damn Del Lobos,” Sadie said with an answering shrug. “Even if that does pay the bills.” They’d taken down two bounties in the two weeks since she’d finished recovering from the cholera, and started to get recognized out in Escalera. “It’s that or go hunt down that jaguar, and I suppose the cat’s been running around a damn year and a half. It can wait another week.”

“All right then. If we’re looking to make a good impression, and have the horses fresh if we need them, thinking it’s best to take the train?” He gestured at the two of them, a bit dusty from a ride that morning to give the horses a good run. “Ain’t like a ride through the desert’s gonna improve our appearance. Plus we avoid possibly running into our buddies the Del Lobos that way.”

“The accounts can cover it,” she acknowledged. “We had a good month so far, and the train’s damn cheap down here besides.” They were always mindful that while they had a good amount of cash on hand from the dying days of the gang, that stream would slowly diminish if they didn’t mind it. Right now it kept them comfortably afloat enough so that if there wasn’t much work, or he needed a rest to regain strength again, or something came up like her needing a couple weeks taking it easy after the cholera, they weren’t anything like playing the razor’s edge. But they could only do that for so long, and he knew full well both of them minded that ledger and that financial cushion with all the anxiousness of two people who’d been on the edge of being broke and starving could.

“Hurrah for Allende on that.” Apparently the governor had done at least one thing right, because she wasn’t kidding on that. They could take the train here for a handful of centavos, whereas it could cost plenty up in America. “Guess the American rail barons ain’t come and messed it all up down here.” Though from the newspapers, Cornwall Junior sounded like he wanted to get involved down here in Mexico, and Allende would welcome him, so who knew where that would go.

She glanced back in the direction of the house. “You think we should dress nicer, if she wants to talk business?”

“No. Don’t think she’s gonna ask us to invest, Sadie. And Casa Madrugada ain’t a high on the hog kind of place. Chances are she wants some rougher work done. No cause to show up dressed flashy.” He would have dressed up for a town job back with the gang, true, but this wasn’t trying to scam some fool into buying fake mining shares, or impress some inbred cotton plantation folk by pandering to the airs they put on, let alone playing poker with real high rollers on a Lannahechee riverboat. “Especially no cause for you dressed in a skirt.”

“Goddamn it,” she muttered in irritation, shaking out her turquoise and black poncho vigorously to get some of the dust out, “a woman can’t win, no matter what she does. Wear pants and I’m a disgrace to womankind, wear a skirt and what few chances I got of being taken seriously for doing a _man’s_ job go right out the window.”

“I know. Ain’t right, or fair.” He did what he could, but he could see still the uphill battle she fought constantly. He’d known the world was unkind to women for sure, but being with Sadie meant he saw it in a way he hadn’t exactly until he’d had this woman who stood beside him, doing the same things he did, able to compare it so directly how people reacted to both of them. Saw her getting only a fraction of the respect he got simply by virtue of showing up and being a man, having to fight over and over in any new situation, pushing and arguing for even the chance to prove herself.

He’d cost them a job or two already by flat-out refusing to work with those who wouldn’t take her on also, and she called him a fool for letting the money go, that chances were more folks than not would give her crap, and he couldn’t afford to piss them all off. Maybe she was right about that reality, but it felt damn good anyway to stand up for something that he felt was the right thing, deep in his bones. But even as she said it, he could see the look on her face all the same. He’d rather have that respect and affection from her, and prove that she could keep trusting him to have her back and to fight for her rather than throw her to the lions for convenience, than just about anything. _We stick together. That’s how it goes,_ he told her. That was what mattered. 

She glanced over at him and gave him that little smile of acknowledgment of that facet of things. He’d fight for her where he could, so long as it didn’t take her out at the knees and let her not fight for herself too. It was a balance he was still chasing sometimes, using what advantage he had to help her, without taking her pride. Sometimes he clearly messed it up. He had that day when they came back from Armadillo and she bawled him out for carrying her into the house.

Though as they bought their tickets, got Bob and Buell loaded, and found their seats, things between them blessedly normal again, he couldn’t help but realize all over again how closely they’d averted disaster there. He hadn’t ever planned it or imagined it, but all the same, he’d picked her up like a man would his wife to carry her off to bed. He had to wonder if he had unthinkingly done it that way only because something in him wanted that fragile fantasy for a few short moments. Same as how good it had felt sometimes when taking a nice hot bath at a hotel to let one of the women scrub his back, rub his shoulders, chatter a bit. He knew it wasn’t real, and she was just a working girl pretending her way through yet another customer, just a different service than screwing. But that short time of being able to lose himself in that illusion of something simple and quiet and affectionate had been enough. Just like now, he’d lost himself in those moments with her, when she’d take his hand or hold him tight in a hug, look at him and smile, and that wasn’t faked, she meant every bit of it. It was good, it was better than anything he’d had in his life, but now something restless in him longed for even more. _You’re just about as sorry a man as ever existed, you know that? Probably would be more honest if you could just be happy paying for pleasure like most men._

Sadie had gotten upset at him even accidentally pushing at the boundaries of what she’d given only to Jake, and he’d deserved her hollering at him for it. Though she’d apologized too, tried to awkwardly claim it was only her pride that had been hurt, but he knew better. He’d clumsily tried to take something he had no right to, she’d let him know it, and he was luckier than he deserved that she’d let him off the hook gracefully as she had.

He still wasn’t sure whether throwing her over his shoulder or supporting her while slowly letting her wear herself out struggling up the stairs would have been the best idea, but obviously he’d gone for the absolutely wrong one in picking her up as he had. He only hoped she thought he’d simply been thoughtless and impatient, and didn’t read between the lines with how careless he’d been to see what had really been going on. He needed to control himself better, that was for damn certain. 

Diez Coronas had its own beauty, compared to the generally lower ridges and canyons and arches in Perdido that typically filled the horizon, here it was all towering rock spires and flat-topped mesas stippling the sands in discrete formations. The train arrived at Casa Madrugada right in the heat of mid-afternoon, so it was a relief to head towards the adobe buildings and get into the shade, noticing it was quiet time. Only a few men playing dice downstairs in the saloon--the rest would come out at night. It was an oasis of vice in the desert, all right. 

Julia Machado was indeed the madam, and welcomed them into her small sitting room. Solid and comfortable but not lavish, no pretense, much like the woman herself. She offered them coffee, and sitting there with the thick clay mugs, he glanced over at Sadie, seeing her nod back at him. “A business proposition, you said.”

“You strike me as two people who prefer plain speech. So here it is. My hired man who protected the girls ran off four months ago. Now I have a man who has become a problem. He comes here. He’s rough. He forces my girls to do things they would rather not. He refuses to pay. And yes, I’ve tied my own hands on this since I have to pay the _Rurales_ to look the other way here in Casa Madrugada.”

Standard payoff--for as long as there had been law enforcement and the vice they were supposedly stamping out, there had been bribes to turn a blind eye and keep the booze, painted ladies, games, and opium flowing. Some things didn’t change regardless of country. He and Sadie had occasionally run into roaming members of the _Guardia Rural_ , something like the Mexican answer to US Marshals or the Texas Rangers, out on patrol. But they were few and spread so thin, and the locals said they acted more as a counterweight and threat to the Army _Federales_ than any kind of effective law. From what he’d seen, plenty of the _Rurales_ weren’t much better than the St. Denis police or the Pinkertons, left without support or living wages or structure, and so turned into tin soldiers for sale to whoever had the money and power to buy them as a private army. 

“That does make things harder,” Sadie acknowledged.

“But even if I went to them, they’d be useless. They would give not a single shit because men say you can’t rape a woman who sells herself, and if he beats them, well, indecent women give up any right to a man’s protection. Plus he’s a _gringo_. So they would be more reluctant to go after him anyway.”

“So you can’t go to the law, and here you’ve called in two folk noted for being able to go after violent men. Plus we’re Americanos, so we can chase him over the border if need be. I following you correctly so far?” She nodded at that, just a small, single nod. He crossed his legs, sitting back in the chair. “What exactly is it you’re wanting us to go do to this fella, ma’am? I been my share of things, but I ain’t a killer for hire.” It hadn’t been hard to deny Mayor Lemieux, to spare Jean-Marc. He could claim few sins left unexplored, but deliberate assassination was one of them. The gang had never inclined that way, so at least Dutch had never twisted his arm into doing that. He’d heard Italians had their notorious blood feuds, their _vendettas_ , so maybe he ought to be relieved that Bronte had only asked them to deal with grave robbers rather than kill a rival. Three guesses who Dutch would have expected to handle that dirty work. 

Machado shot him a look, her dark eyes snapping. “Hunting bounties is being paid for delivering a person’s life, or dead body, isn’t it? Or does the fact that you hand the man over to someone else to be shot make that much difference?”

“It does,” Sadie cut in. “There’s lines we gotta draw, or we’re no better than the folk we’re bringing in. Maybe that don’t mean much to you, but it does to us.” He couldn’t help the relief that she explained it, and so well. Maybe Machado had a point. Sometimes the line felt very thin. But all the same, it felt miles and miles away from the things he’d done, beating and shooting and threatening anyone in the way, innocent or guilty, for the sake of money.

She looked away, lips clamping for a moment into a tight line of frustration. “Then fine. I’ll handle him. Three hundred pesos if you’ll find him, and bring him here to me. No questions asked.”

Three hundred pesos was no small figure. Given this wasn’t exactly an opulent vice town, it was a big amount of money for her to cough up. This man must be bad news. “Way I see it, there ain’t no excuse for a man who beats on women, takes them by force, any of it. _Any_ woman, mind. No matter what she does to get by. That don’t give any man the right to hurt her.”

“You’re unusual in that opinion, Mr. Griffith.”

“But we haul this asshole in here and just hand him over to you, we become part of whatever you got planned for him. Time was that I would take on jobs from folk who said I didn’t get to ask questions. Them days, and that man I was? They’re gone.”

“Then I suppose there’s nothing you can do,” Machado said, voice suddenly tired. “I admit I hoped for better given your reputations.”

The guilt stabbed at him like a cactus thorn. Though he could see Sadie bristling. “Oh, c’mon, don’t try the ‘woman in distress’ act. I hate that shit. You’re strong enough to run this place, don’t try no weak simpering tears to make him feel sorry for you.”

“What other path do I have?” Now the rage and frustration in her eyes. “He’ll kill one of them soon enough. He beat Florita half to death last time, bit her besides. So what, do I shoot him the moment he walks in?”

“With your luck, the _Rurales_ actually will care about that.” He held up a hand, sensing her temper gathering. “I ain’t poking fun at you. But I’d as soon not see a bounty poster going up demanding someone haul you in to Escalera for murdering some useless sack of crap who calls himself a man.”

She sighed, shaking her head. “I don’t know what to do with him. Honestly, I figured I would see what you two were willing to do and let that guide me. Dead would be the most convenient for me, I suppose, but mostly I just want him gone.”

He thought on that for a few moments, scratching his chin. “We find him. We bring him here. You and your girls can kick the shit out of him. I figure they deserve that. He leaves here alive, nobody gets arrested. That do it, just about?”

“If he thinks I’ve got people on my payroll who’ll go to all that trouble just to get him a beating, he’ll avoid Casa Madrugada in the future. Yes, that’ll do very nicely.”

“All right, then tell us the sorry sack of shit’s name, what he looks like, and what places you know he might be scuttling around.”

“His name is Dennis Byrd.”

Now that name rung a bell. He couldn’t help but laugh then, and both Sadie and Machado looked at him like he suddenly had gone pure loco. “ _Señora_ Machado, I think it’s your lucky day.” Digging through the satchel, he pulled out the stack of bounty posters they’d picked up in New Austin. He hadn’t looked through them that thoroughly, figuring he and Sadie would add them to the plan back home, and after she got sick there was no cause to look given they’d want to stick to Nuevo Paraiso for a bit after she got well again. 

He found the poster he’d pulled off the wall of the train station at MacFarlane’s, one of four there at the time. “This your man? Dennis Charles Byrd, wanted for bank robbery, assault, theft, rape, and murder.” Described as early thirties, “stout”, brown hair, blue eyes. Two hundred dollar reward, no less.

Though he’d missed one crucial detail when he’d pulled that poster down, and he did his best to not react to it with Machado watching, though inside, he flinched. He handed the poster to Machado. She glanced at the picture, crude as it was. “Yes, that’s him.”

“Good. He’s already a wanted man up north, in West Elizabeth. The police in Blackwater posted that bounty, and it was big enough for that poster to get into New Austin. He’ll hang for sure.”

“Blackwater?” Sadie said, eyes going wide for a moment, before she got it under control. He gave her a slight nod, knowing she’d found the problem. Not quite two years might not have been enough for him to risk showing his face in Blackwater. He’d tested his luck on that pass-through just before dawn on the way to Mexico. She recovered well, all the same. “Been a time since we was out that way.” 

“Sure has. You still want us to bring him by for that chat first?”

Machado thought about it, then shook her head. “Satisfying as it would be, that makes more chance for him to escape. Just get him to the law in America so I can tell my girls they’ll never see him again.” She raised an eyebrow. “Please give him a few kicks, though, on their behalf. I’m sure he’ll do or say something to deserve it.” 

“Sure,” Sadie agreed, cheer at the idea obvious in her voice.

Machado hesitated for a moment, then shrugged. “I’d still pay you, if you can prove you turned him in. You’re taking care of my problem.”

“Ain’t no need for that.” Being paid twice for the same job felt odd, and besides, sometimes it was better to do something without making it about cash. 

Sadie gave a slight shrug. “You want my advice? Take that money, get your girls some guns instead, to keep in their rooms. The next man who gets a notion of raising his hand to a woman here might think twice with her pointing a gun at him. We’ll teach them to shoot, if need be.” 

She shook her head, looking incredulous. “You two really are a different sort.”

“I learned the hard way sometimes a woman’s gotta make bad men take her seriously by making him learn she ain’t so helpless as he thinks,” Sadie answered her. “They expect us never to be no threat to them. Your girls ain’t delicate. Hell, you ain’t delicate. So why are you putting yourself at the mercy of all these dumbasses swaggering in here thinking having a pistol belt, a few pesos, and an eager pecker makes them special? A woman can pull a trigger just as easy as a man. I gone and proved it, and the world ain’t collapsed yet. So give those gals some claws and teeth, and get some yourself.” 

“Maybe I shall.” Machado’s smile at that was a genuine, pleased one. “And I like the idea of a woman being involved in ending him. Good luck finding _Señor_ Byrd. I’ll tell you what I know. Let me know when he’s been handled, _por favor_.”

~~~~~~~~~~

She lasted until they got back to the train platform and out of earshot, and thrust Byrd’s bounty poster at Arthur. “ _Blackwater_? You gone insane, boy? You think we been through all that of getting you here, getting you well, just so you can maybe end up sitting in a cell alongside this jackass? I ain’t watching you hang!” Not for the sake of a hundred and fifty dollars, not for anything.

“The money’s good, sure, but mostly, seems to me this bastard needs to be gone before he ends up hurting more folk.” 

“It’s good you’re doing right things, but don’t you get reckless with it.”

“So we capture him, and you haul him into Blackwater yourself.” He glanced at her. “Tell me honest enough. I look different enough these days to not worry about a target on my back, generally speaking?”

She looked him over, trying to not think too much about his looks. It helped that she was a bit irritated with him. “Was you shaving regular and dressing finer back then?” 

“Yeah. We was staying in town and Hosea and me was working these cheats and con men on a real estate scam, so I had to stay spruced up.” 

Comparing him now, the tall and somewhat scruffy man in his red poncho and dusty trousers, disheveled hair and short beard, to the clean-cut figure he’d been then, she shook her head. “If you was pulling the flashy and dapper routine then, yeah, I’d say you look different enough.”

“That you saying I look like a hobo now?”

“Oh, shut up.” She rolled her eyes. “I’d say it’s you being you and not worrying so much about looking fancy like Dutch or Hosea.” Both of them cut a dashing figure, after all, and she suspected their anxious, eager to please adopted son had wanted to emulate both of his fathers.

“Might be something to that.”

Though now she had the feeling he was really asking something else. _Have I changed enough from who I was?_ “You’ve changed a hell of a lot since them days, trust me, and for the better. The man you become--you should be proud of that.” It was the changes inside that mattered far more. “You do clean up real nice, though.” She saw that awkward shyness in him at the compliments, and hurried to say, “Though it ain’t like that’s needed, the things we’re doing most days.” The last thing he needed was to feel like she expected him to primp and polish for chasing bounties and things like that. Though she couldn’t help but feel like she’d somehow messed up, complimented him and then immediately rescinded it by saying he shouldn’t bother. Damn it. She felt so wrongfooted sometimes around him still, and then things would snap right back to that simplicity and ease between them. “But you should wear what makes you feel good, you know?” Great. She’d only made it even more awkward. Things just hadn’t settled yet for her, no matter how much Calderón’s advice had helped.

He gracefully sidestepped them both out of that particular hellish patch of verbal quicksand. “Well, we got Pedro and Juanita’s wedding in a few weeks. Good chance to look fancy there, right? That’ll be nice.” He gave her a teasing smile. “Though I’m pretty sure if you wanted to bounty hunt in a skirt, that sure as shit wouldn’t slow you down. And it’d show all those fools.”

She had to laugh at that. “I’ll stick to the pants, thanks.” But it’d be nice to get all dressed up for the wedding. She’d bought a dress for it last time they delivered a bounty to Escalera. “Speaking of hunting bounties,” she indicated the poster. “She did say folk saw him last around Mesa Del Sol, northeast of here. Guess that’s as good a place to start.”

Mounted up on Bob, bandana tugged up, she heard him murmuring something to Buell, ready to head out. The worst heat of the day had passed while they were at Casa Madrugada, so they headed towards Mesa Del Sol, riding among the soaring rock formations.

Dennis Byrd apparently wasn’t the brightest, because they found him all right, in the shadow of the mesa, and it looked like the idiot was busy digging a hole to bury some loot besides. “Busy day’s work, Dennis?” Arthur called lazily, leaning over Buell’s withers. 

Byrd flung something, and suddenly the world exploded, the sand and ground rising up in front of her like a massive earth-based tidal wave, her ears roaring and ringing. Bob whinnying and rearing, bucking, and he tipped her off. She instinctively rolled away and tucked into a ball, not wanting to be caught under those plunging hooves while he got the fright out of his system. The dust was too thick even for her bandana, and she ended up coughing, pulling the fabric up to spit out the grit. “Arthur?” she yelled, though her ears were still ringing. “You alive?”

“Just about.” Though as he approached, he was on foot too, coughing as well. She saw him wiping his lips with the back of his hand, obviously anxious at checking for blood, scrubbing at the red streak of it on his hand and finding it came from a cut, probably from a flying chip of rock. He had one on his face too, and she could see she had them on her hands too, from where she’d instinctively flung up her hands to shield from the blast. He coughed again, and there was a raspy edge to his voice as he said, “Buell spooked and threw me off. Can’t blame him.”

The dust started to settle, and with a whistle, Buell and Bob came back around, Bob nudging her shoulder with his nose as if in apology. “Ain’t your fault, boy,” she told him, reaching for her canteen and rinsing her mouth, spitting again, and then taking a drink, inspecting him and finding he was OK, much to her relief. Some superficial cuts, much like she and Arthur both had, and she could see a few streaks of blood on Buell’s creamy pale hide too, but it looked like they’d been scratched up a bit was all. She’d lost Betsy--Queen Elizabeth I, really, because it felt only fitting to continue naming the animals for Tudors--to the O’Driscolls stealing her, and she couldn’t bear to lose Bob, faithful Bob who’d seen her through so much already.

Arthur turned to her and she heard the steel and fire in his voice gone rough with anger, “That miserable little fucker flung dynamite at our horses.” 

“We going after him?”

“Sure we are.” He patted Buell’s flank, holding a peppermint out for the horse in his palm. As Buell lipped it up, he grabbed his saddle horn, swung up onto Buell’s back, and took the reins. “He’s twitchy enough to pull shit like that, he’s a menace to anyone. Liable to shoot anyone who cuts a loud fart. Plus,” he pulled his bandana back up, “I already didn’t like him for being a piece of shit who likes hurting women, and he’s Goddamn well gone and _irritated_ me now besides.”

Giving Bob a treat of a butterscotch candy herself, she mounted up again, scanning already for tracks, and found them. A poorly shod horse, so that would be even easier to track. “Northeast,” she said, pointing.

“You got the lead,” he acknowledged, sidestepping Buell to follow her.

It took only about twenty minutes or so, weaving among the rocks and bluffs, to catch up, and she saw him on a scruffy chestnut Tennessee Walker. Though when Byrd saw them, he put the spurs to the poor beast, heading right for the nearby tracks, and the fast-oncoming train.

“Aw, hell,” Arthur said. “I pulled this trick often enough.” He shook his head, pulling Buell up. “We ain’t making it. We gotta wait it out.”

“We’ll catch him again.” She watched Byrd cross right in front of the train, the conductor blowing a warning whistle of protest, and sitting there for a good minute and a half while the train went by was no easy task, but finally the caboose rumbled by, and she kneed Bob into a walk over the rails, scanning already for tracks. No easy task, given the tracks near any railroad were usually a mess, and this was a crossing besides, so it took her a minute or so. Though they didn’t go north as she expected, but continued east. 

Just as she did that, Arthur yelled, “He hopped the damn train!” She looked that way, startled, seeing him with binoculars in one hand, pointing towards the train already fading into the distance. Grabbing her own binoculars, she saw the little brown horse trotting alongside the train, keeping pace, but distinctly riderless. 

When she shoved the binoculars back into her bag, he had Buell already flying into a gallop to catch up. She urged Bob on as well, coaxing him on, leaning down to murmur in his ear, “I know it’s been a rough day, boy, scary one too. But gimme all you got right now, and I’ll get the jackass who hurt you.” 

Bob responded to that, actually beating Buell to a flatbed car, and she pushed up to her feet on his saddle, balancing carefully, and then leaped, landing and rolling to take the force of it. She heard the grunt behind her that announced Arthur had made it also, and turned to see him there in a crouch, green eyes still blazing with a determined fury. “Got a plan?” she asked. “This is one long train, and we’re about in the middle of it.”

“Split up and search. You head forward, I’ll head back. Whoever finds him, fire a shot.” She nodded at that, pulling the revolver from her right holster and keeping to a crouch as she approached the door of the first car, cargo by the looks of it. Cleared that car carefully, eyes adjusting to the gloom of the windowless wooden box, and moved on to the next one.

She found him three cars forward, in a passenger car no less, getting up from a wooden bench where he’d presumably sat nonchalant as he pleased, acting like a man who’d paid his fare and decided to change seats from a car further back. She recognized that black bowler and blue jacket. Looking at him closely, he was decent looking enough, aside from that squashed cauliflower of a nose that had been punched a few too many times. She itched to punch it again. She pulled her revolver and held it up. “You gonna come quietly, Byrd?”

“Woman, I don’t know who you are or what you think you’re doing--”

She didn’t take her eyes off of him. “This man’s wanted in the state of West Elizabeth. Anyone here want to protest me taking this trash off the train at the next stop?” Silence answered her. “Looks like you’re out of friends. Might as well come quietly.”

Of course he couldn’t, grabbing a man by the shoulders and roughly shoving him at Sadie, then turning and running for the door. Trying to dodge a stumbling man in the narrow aisle was no easy task, so by the time they got that sorted out and she jumped past him, Byrd was already gone. She hurried towards the next car forward, scanning for him, slowly moving through and checking every nook and cranny of the baggage car.

The sound of a gunshot behind her, and above, quickened her pulse. “That little shit.” He’d doubled back like a fox, gotten onto the roof of the train, hoping to make that his escape. Hurrying out of that car, she grabbed the ladder on the end, and climbed. Standing on the rooftop there, she saw them four cars back, Arthur obviously having decided to check the roof of the train. Smart move on his part, but then, he’d been clever enough himself about pulling illicit doings on trains back in the day.

Working her way back as quickly as she could, jumping from car to car and keeping balanced against the jolt and rumble of the train on the tracks, heart pounding and trying to not stumble in her energetic haste, she made it to them, Byrd’s back still turned. Finally she could make out the words that had been whipped away previously by the desert wind. “...swear I recognize you.”

“Got the wrong man, I’m afraid.” Arthur didn’t look at her, and give away that she was behind him, but she could sense he’d seen her, and he was keeping the man talking and distracted.

“No, no, I don’t.” She approached quietly, pulling her lasso. “You was riding with the Pozners, wasn’t you? Utah, back in ‘95. Think I saw you there, in Sanctuary, when Colm O’Driscoll tried to take the score off Fred and Lee Pozner as you lot was coming out of the bank with the haul.”

Arthur smiled. “Oh, _amigo_ , you rode with Colm? Real unfortunate for you that my partner here don’t take kindly to an O’Driscoll.” She snapped her wrist out, flinging the lasso around Byrd, and pulling it tight, jerking him off his feet. Arthur moved in then, rapidly and efficiently hogtying him. “What you say, sweetheart, should we pitch him off this train right now?”

He wasn’t being serious. She knew it. So she played along to it, the better to keep the son of a bitch scared and docile. “Nah, better to get the bounty for his pathetic hide. Satisfying as it would be to send another O’Driscoll to hell. Especially after he almost killed our horses to boot.” Sad that if he’d killed either Bob or Buell that they could have added that to his list of crimes, whereas what he’d done at Casa Madrugada wouldn’t register. Like she’d told the women in camp, horses held more worth to too many men than women.

It worked, and she saw his eyes go wide with fright. “I rode with Colm for only about two months! Mean bastard. I was glad to be done with him.”

“Well, seems he sure gave you his taste for raping, mayhem, and killing,” Arthur said dryly.

She planted a kick right in his ribs, and then another in his crotch. “That’s a present from the ladies of Casa Madrugada.”

He managed to wheeze, “Those ain’t no ladies, they’re just no-good dirty--”

Arthur leaned in, lowering his voice. “You wanna rethink that sentence before you finish it, or you want to reach Blackwater with your cock cut off and fed to your horse?”

“Bet it wouldn’t make much of a meal,” she said with amusement. Though at that exchange, much as she appreciated the joke, she couldn’t help but remember that first time they’d said it, how she’d snapped to Arthur exactly what she’d like to do to another helplessly bound and captive short-term O’Driscoll. She’d been so unable to be kind to Kieran. Deliberate indifference was about the best she could manage most days. Then he’d died so awfully. Just like Arthur had been, a pawn to be used, abused, and discarded, worth only the taunt written in his suffering. She didn’t doubt that if Arthur hadn’t gotten himself free that they would have had his body sent back when Dutch didn’t come to get him back like Colm hoped. Had Dutch actually somehow convinced himself Arthur was fine when he didn’t come back from that parlay, telling everyone in camp who asked that Arthur was off hunting, or had he not cared and abandoned Arthur to death, even then? 

Would she have saved Kieran, though, had they known Colm had him, given the chance to save his life? Had he died in pain and fear, assuming she’d hated him, that in her way she was as savage and cruel as Colm? She’d become something she hated for a little while herself, but she’d gotten the chance to make amends, rather than being murdered for it. _I’m sorry, Kieran. You deserved better. From me. From all of us._

This bastard, though, was no Kieran, a gentle and awkward lost soul caught up in something far beyond him. He’d chosen his path, and enjoyed it. She could see the shrewd cunning in his eyes as he stared up at Arthur, completely ignoring her. Of course. She was beneath notice, except for sex or beating. He wouldn’t acknowledge a woman had been a part of his capture. He’d damn well have to acknowledge it when she was the one to drag him into the police station, and she couldn’t help but savor that idea. “Bet the police chief in Blackwater would love to hear where he can find a member of the Pozners. How about you let me go and we call it square?”

Her heart just about stopped, then fluttered in panic. Yes, he'd gotten the gang wrong, but had he actually identified Arthur as the member of a gang? Though somehow, Arthur laughed at that, sounding carefree as a lark in spring. “Yeah, sure. You got me. I rode with Lee and Fred Pozner for six weeks, just about. Bastards treated me like shit, expected me to bow and scrape and kiss their asses. Cheated me on my share besides, so I left. One bank robbery, Byrd, and we done that one clean as fresh snowfall, no killing. So the statute on that expired last year. After I left, I went on the straight and narrow. Found it better running bounties and calling my own shots than being some fool’s loyal pet.” There was a hard, brittle edge to his tone that she could hear, and she wondered just how much anger at Dutch was coming out with those words fairly dripping with scornful derision, and perhaps anger at himself for having followed so faithfully and blindly for so many years. “So by all means, tell them lawmen you met George Dupree. Shit, both Pozner brothers barely even knew my name. The lawmen sure won’t. So when they say ‘Who the hell’s George Dupree, boy?’, you’re gonna realize that information ain’t even worth enough to them to wipe their asses.” He patted Byrd’s shoulder. “Nice try, though. My advice? Take it like a man. You got a couple weeks at most once we get you to Blackwater until you hang. Might do you some good to think about what you can get right in your life in that time. You got a wife? Family?”

Byrd stared at him in astonishment, then his jaw dropped, and he started laughing, gasping and wheezing for breath around his bruised or cracked ribs. “You really are one ‘saved by the light of goodness’ stuck up son of a bitch, ain’t you, Dupree? My God. All right, you got me, but you sure ain’t saving my soul.” He grinned. “No repentance here, sir. No wife, no kids--none that I know about or would want to claim, anyhow. So haul me in, let them hang me, and damn you both for it.” 

Arthur had covered it well, to the point Byrd completely bought it, but that settled it. No way he could go into Blackwater just yet. True, a member of another gang would have noted a rival's face a lot more closely than a bounty hunter or ordinary citizen, and the fact he'd completely gotten the gang wrong meant maybe he was just fishing. But it unsettled her all the same. But they'd deal with that. When it came to Byrd, the overall hot satisfaction couldn’t be denied. It was different from the red rage she’d felt in chasing down O’Driscolls, Tommy Watkins in particular. There was something better and deeper to this capture. This was one more man who wouldn’t be hurting more women, and laughing about it. She couldn’t carve out what they’d done to her, the life and love and security and hopes they'd taken, but it had become less somehow in her life. It was a shadow now rather than an all-consuming blackness.

So she could hunt bad men like this, and do it purposefully and calmly, turning away from the ruthless killer they’d helped form her into with their violence. She could sleep without a gun beneath her pillow, fearing the door being kicked in. She could be around a big, strong man and not immediately want to run or fight. She was herself again, not some ruined and frightened husk, and if there was something that was a disquiet within her, it was in soft wishes that the hands on her skin, the finger stroking between her thighs, were Arthur’s and not her own, when she satisfied that restlessness within her that had come to life again. But her body, her desire to have and to feel all of that again, were her own. That was hers now to give, whether Arthur wanted it in the end or not, rather than having it taken. _I ain’t your plaything, and I ain’t your monster. I’m your worst Goddamn nightmare, mister._ She was a woman who’d beaten him and his kind. They’d hurt her, broken her, but she’d rebuilt herself, and she could take a fierce pride in that.

“Ain’t nobody gonna mourn you,” Sadie answered him, crouching down and making sure the sight of her filled his vision as Arthur grabbed him, dragging him towards the ladder to help get him down into the train. No point riding the whole way to MacFarlane’s up here and courting all that risk. “Or even remember you. Cause them as you hurt? Someday they’re gonna forget you. They’ll live good lives, be happy. You? You’re gonna vanish from this world like the miserable waste of air that you are.” She made a gesture of something scattered in the wind. “Gone like you never even was.”

She saw Byrd close his eyes to ignore her, and that was enough. She’d made him flinch, knowing a woman had fought back, made him afraid, and helped best him, and told him a hard truth. Now he was the one powerless, made to feel small and worthless, and there was a strange kind of justice to that. Remembering Machado’s pleased smile at the idea that a woman would help capture Byrd, she hoped for the women at Casa Madrugada, maybe that would be satisfaction enough too, and they could start their own healing.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Caroline to Sadie**  
Dear Sadie,  
All right, I got to admit you won. I thought I become the Griffith black sheep forever in the eyes of polite society by running off to Oregon and marrying Harold as I done, but then you had to join a gang and find yourself an outlaw to love besides? We always did have to try to outdo each other but I don’t think I can ever best you on that. I say it only in jest so don’t you go getting your back up about it none. Clear as daylight that you’d defend this fella with everything you got, which tells me plenty about the regard you have for him.

We ain’t so uninformed of events further east as you might think, Sadie. Papers was full of news about the goings on, and given my and Harold’s encounters with the O’Driscolls we took notice of things involving them. Though the fact you wouldn’t admit readily to what folk it was took you in tells me it wasn’t no small time gang. That narrows the field something considerable given things have changed greatly from when we was kids and seemed like outlaws was running around New Austin like it was their own private Garden of Eden. Only a few gangs left out there, and them being hunted down hard.

There is an Englishman, Doyle, who writes stories about this detective named Sherlock Holmes. Real good reading if you ain’t seen it. He can look at a thing like a pocket watch and tell plenty about a person from it. Call me your Holmes, sister, cause I believe this one I can figure out from clues you given me, even if you thought you was playing coy.

Only one big gang as was noted in Ambarino and St. Denis both year before last, as you mentioned seeing the hanging of Colm O’Driscoll there. I really hope you wasn’t involved in that bank robbery there. 

So which of the notorious Van Der Linde Gang has went and changed his crooked ways? You’re in Mexico, and wasn’t there a Mexican running with them, so maybe it’s him. But the last name “Griffith” might look strange there and cause notice, so I suppose not him. Ain’t like the papers reported much on them as individual men except in passing. You’d best have done with it and just tell me who it is. I know you wouldn’t go lightly with a man so if I might well be calling him my outlaw turned in-law best I should know what Harold and me ought to call him instead of just “that mystery fella of Sadie’s.” Don’t really roll off the tongue neatly.

Your life is your own and I know you for a sensible woman so I trust whatever you say about this man, you truly believe him to be all that. Though only fair that as much as you made your share of remarks about Harold I gotta say it does sound incredible and you write the man as more than halfway to an angel. But you know who he is and what he done in the past, especially if you was living with that gang. So it ain’t as if you are some sheltered schoolgirl pretending. Some part of me hopes to meet this fella and try to make sense of what seems to be two very opposite accounts of a man who run with a gang of hardened thieves and killers and you saying he’s as sweet and gentle as a kitten, but a coin has two sides too I suppose. Whatever the case, don’t fuss about me ratting you out. If he’s changed his ways and he treats you right that’s good enough for me. 

I am sorry about Jake. You know how I loved him too. If you should visit his grave anytime give him my love. No easy thing to imagine picking up a gun and going out with intent to murder a fella, or a whole bunch of them. But Harold and me have had to kill some men in our day. A couple O’Driscolls, so we have that in common. I ain’t exactly proud to say it, given how much our folks and the Adlers both believed there was always some other way than taking a life, but sometimes that’s the way of it. It was a way that worked better in Pennsylvania, because things there are settled and quiet. It’s a rougher life in the west, and it goes by different rules. It was always a matter of my life and Harold’s or theirs when I pulled a trigger, so I done it, and I can’t feel sorry for it. If that makes me closer to the animals, then I’d sooner be alive to care for my kids than a dead martyr to ideals.

You take care of yourself. Cholera is nothing to mess around with and you’re damn lucky to be alive after that. Thank you for visiting Tumbleweed. It’s a sad thing to hear everything is gone but it seems you and me made other dreams. You lost one dream with Jake, but seems you been finding a new one. You always was strong. Stubborn too, but strong.

It’s good to write you. Good to say a lot of things that have stayed shut up for their share of years. Funny how age takes the edge of quarrels and makes me realize how much I have missed you.

Our love to you and our best to Mister Saint Bandit Griffith (which I swear I will continue to call him until you provide me something else and you have only yourself to blame for that). The kids would like a picture of their Aunt Sadie if you find yourself in a town with a photographer, as the most recent one I have is of us from way back in ‘89. If things go as you hope and he becomes their Uncle Saint Bandit, let’s see what he looks like too. I swear I won’t be comparing your wedding picture to any bounty posters.

Your loving sister,  
Caroline


	21. Chuparosa I: Justice Of A Peculiar Kind II

Getting off the train with their still-bound quarry at MacFarlane’s Ranch, having sat with him in the baggage car the rest of the way from Butter Bridge onward, the ticket agent there looked at them doubtfully. “You two sure you don’t wanna just buy a ticket and continue on to the Blackwater, you heading there already as is to turn him in?”

She shook her head. “Sooner save the money, fella, sorry.”

He laughed at that. “If I could I’d just tell you to stay in the baggage car, but even you two taking down this fool and protecting the peace, well, that wouldn’t make the conductor not want to collect his fare, so I can’t say as I blame you.” He tipped them a small salute, three fingers to the brim of his cap, and turned to help the next customer.

She watched Arthur throw Byrd over his shoulder and walk over towards Bob and Buell, and once they were out of earshot, turned back to the agent. “You mind getting a message up to the house for Drew and Bonnie? Tell them that Sadie and Arthur Griffith come through, but we wasn’t able to stop just now, given we got that particular obligation in Blackwater to tend to first.” She nodded towards the west, where the sun was already sinking now. “Likely ain’t gonna make Blackwater before dark as is. I expect we’ll be back through sometime tomorrow, though, and we’ll stop by a bit then if they’d like.” 

She handed him a dollar for the courier job, and then headed towards the horses, seeing Byrd slung over Bob’s hindquarters, and Arthur giving Buell a quick brush down. Bob didn’t even react to an annoyed man squirming a bit on his back, since he usually carried the bounty anyway. Arthur had made a direct and deliberate point of them doing that, saying that riding into Escalera to the _Comandante_ with their quarry on Bob’s back, even if sometimes it would only be a short ride from the train station, made a sharper argument for her being taken seriously than if Arthur carried him on Buell. She had to admit he’d been right on that. Strange education he’d had, all right, from that gang of cons and thieves and killers, but it meant he was smart when it came to perceiving the effect of little tricks of theatricality like that. “Besides,” he’d said with a self-deprecating laugh, “you’re littler than me, so Bob can carry the extra weight better than Buell anyway.”

This time, she had to carry Byrd anyway given Arthur couldn’t go with her to Blackwater. Mounting up, they turned for the east. Barely made it past the gates of the ranch before Byrd started up. “Dupree, come on. Have a heart. At least be the one to turn me in yourself.”

Arthur gave a derisive snort at that. “Nope. She roped you, she turns you in. And given you’re a low down piece of shit who likes hurting women, well, I can’t think of nothing better than a woman being the one to get you that comeuppance. There’s some justice in this world after all.”

“I ain’t going to the gallows with people laughing at me that some bitch trying to be a man brung me in.”

Arthur reined Buell in, turning back towards Byrd, his voice suddenly a deceptively soft growl. “Call her that again, mister, and might be you don’t live to see Blackwater. Your bounty’s dead or alive. Keep testing me and we’ll both find out how much I care about that extra twenty bucks.”

Byrd let out a wild laugh. “So touchy. So quick to defend her. So she’s your woman, or are you hers if you’re insisting she’s in charge? She gotta try to fuck like a man too? Pretty boy like you probably would be the sort for taking it up the ass and moaning cause you love it so much, Dupree.” 

She heard the click of the safety and saw Arthur pointing the revolver at Byrd, eyes blazing, features gone tight with anger. She couldn’t think he was that bothered by the attempt to goad him, given that one had been aimed far more squarely at him than at her anyway, and he usually just shrugged off someone insulting him like rain rolling down a roof. But then she thought of Colm and what had happened to him, and she’d felt that overwhelming feeling of panic and rage and shame at being hit in a spot she hadn’t deigned to acknowledge, wanting nothing more than to lash out and destroy something and someone. “Ar--” Shit, she couldn’t say his name, given he was supposedly named George Dupree. She forced her voice to stay calm, almost bored. “Ain’t no need to get upset for my sake. He’s just trying to piss you off and get himself killed cause he’s afraid to have me haul him in, and afraid to hang besides.”

Arthur gave a tight, angry nod, shoving the revolver back into his holster. “Too convenient for him, I agree. Then let’s not by no means oblige him.” He swung down from Buell, though, and fished in his pocket for a handkerchief, twisting it into a rope of sorts. He smiled a wolfish grin at Byrd. “Me, I know your type. Petty bastards with big mouths who think that succeeding in annoying folk means you’re better than them. Just makes you nothing more than one ugly overgrown parasite. So,” he shoved the gag into Byrd’s mouth and tied it behind his head, “my partner and me are gonna have a nice ride to Blackwater without being further troubled by your nasty mouth. Cause the world don’t have to put up with anything you say or do no more, and we’re all better for it. You think on that a while.” He patted Byrd mockingly on the head and then headed back to Buell.

She had to admit, the lack of hearing his crap for the rest of the ride made the thing a lot more pleasant. It was nearly dark already by the time they approached Blackwater, the electric lights of the city visible well in the distance as they rode along the prairie, a soft smudgy glow against the deepening purple-grey of gathering dusk. “I’ll handle taking him in,” she said. “We got that contract to talk with Jasper, so you might as well attend to that.”

He played along immediately. “I do at that. I say you should tell the police chief you done it yourself. Watch this fool go just about crazy swearing up and down that ain’t the case, and everyone thinking he’s just telling tales cause he’s embarrassed.” He gave her a grin. “Hell, we both know you could have taken him down yourself. You gonna catch up with me at Jasper’s when you’re done?”

“Course. Better we both talk details before signing anything.” 

He switched over to Welsh, which probably made more sense given that Byrd might know Spanish. “I’ll set up camp near Broken Tree.”

She nodded, answering him in English, “See you there.” At that, he peeled off, looking as if he took the trail for the north end of town, and she trusted he’d double back eventually once he was out of sight, though pulling that trick on the flat land of Great Plains where folks could see for miles was no easy one. 

She hadn’t exactly stopped to take in the sights a year and a half ago, so her reference now was to the Blackwater of 1896. Though she didn’t stop to look all that much. It wasn’t pain that kept her from it. She had her memories of Blackwater, and unlike Arthur, hers were good ones. She could remember being here with Jake, laughing and loving, full of hope, and it didn’t hurt nearly as much as she thought it might. It was purposefulness that kept her from gawking too much, although even at a few glances riding down the street, she could see how the town had grown in leaps and bounds in five years. The police station was still relatively tiny, but it looked more spruced up than it had been in those days. Dismounting and hitching Bob, she headed in. “Hello? Got a bounty to deliver.”

The old man at the desk stood, dressed in a neat blue wool uniform, and looked at her. She looked at him. “Chief Dunbar, isn’t it?”

He smiled, a warm expression that looked at home on his kindly face. “That it is. You been through here before, I take it?”

“Not running in a bounty, no.” Mainly it was because the police station fronted onto Sisika Place and its backside faced the backside of the hotel, fronted on Main Street. She and Jake had passed the police station more than a few times taking a stroll in those times they emerged from their room, Jake even striking up a conversation with Dunbar once.

“Well, then. Who have you got, and in what disposition?” He headed towards the door.

“Dennis Byrd, and surly and mean, but alive.”

Dunbar let out a low whistle. “Brought down old Buzzard Byrd yourself, a little thing like you, miss? My compliments.”

“No, my partner and me worked together.” Arthur might have joked about her taking sole credit, but she wasn’t going to do that. He’d been told he didn’t matter often enough, in her opinion, and even a good joke at Byrd’s expense wasn’t worth that. “He’s getting dinner on out at our camp, I suspect. We both decided I should bring the louse in to better annoy Mr. Byrd, given we hear he’s got himself a fondness for abusing women.”

“Well, let’s get him in here, get you paid and on your way to getting that grub.” 

Together they wrangled Byrd into a cell, and she eyed him. “I’d suggest you leave that gag in a while, except to feed him. He does not shut up, that one. Real impressed with the sound of his own voice.”

Dunbar let out a low chuckle at that. “We’ll see.” He dug in his desk, pulled out a thick wad of cash, handing it to her. “Two hundred dollars, as promised, for a job well done. Got some other bounties up, if you’re interested.”

She went to scan the posters tacked to the sheet of cork, figuring she might as well take them, and see if they could manage to get any of them. If nothing else, she and Arthur could repeat this tactic of her making the drop-off. She couldn’t resist asking, seeing Micah’s ugly rat face on a poster, and his five hundred dollar West Elizabeth bounty, “That’s quite the bounty. You seen this miserable fella anywhere?”

“Micah Bell? Not since his gang attacked the ferry,” Dunbar answered, and suddenly there was a grim note in his voice, as he leaned back against the corner of his desk. “Lord, that’s a day the likes of which I ain’t never wanting to see again. Poor Heidi McCourt. Witnesses said that Dutch Van Der Linde himself grabbed her, used her to shield his own sorry ass, and then he killed her like she was nothing. Fought them all the way through town, we did, and that was some hell on earth. People terrified, hiding anywhere they could. Bullets everywhere. I ain’t seen that like since I was on the battlefield, miss, and at least there we didn’t have no kids crying, women screaming. I lost ten of my police force that day. Pinkertons lost twelve of their own who were guarding that bankroll on its way over from St. Denis. Wounded a few of theirs, we did, but only caught one, and he died a few days later of his wounds. Never said anything to the Pinkertons who caught him. Once they left our jurisdiction, had to leave it to the Pinkertons and bounty hunters to continue the chase.” 

She could hear the haunted note in his voice remembering it even now, and suspected he’d see it until the day he died. She hated to ask, but she felt compelled to all the same. “Would you know them if they rode in again?”

“I’d know Van Der Linde, for sure. Big, flashy fella like that, cuts a distinctive figure. The rest?” He sighed, gave a tired shrug. “It all happened so fast, and there was so many of them. No, the last anybody heard of any of that lot was way up near Annesburg in the fall of ‘99, and then the rest scattered like roaches. I don’t expect none of them to be fool enough to come back here in a hurry. Probably ought to take them posters down.” He shook his head, looking over at her, spreading his hands in a quick, confused gesture. “Though Blackwater will be a while in recovering still. Perhaps I shouldn’t let myself hurry to move on. But there are other problems than a broken gang of outlaws flung to the four winds. We’ve managed to clean a lot of the local criminals out since, but they’ve only moved to Thieves’ Landing and thereabouts. I’m still undermanned. Men around town as survived that battle understandable ain’t in a hurry to join the police. So the bounty posters will keep going up, it seems.”

That settled it. Arthur should avoid Blackwater for a good while, but Dunbar probably wouldn’t know him by sight at least, let alone if Byrd started describing the supposed George Dupree. “You care about the folk here, I can tell. Best of luck to you in keeping them safe.”

She turned and headed out, though she did walk down Tallulah Place for a minute, looking up at the hotel, allowing herself to remember. She wouldn’t sleep there tonight, though, even if Arthur could risk coming into town. It would be too much, crossing memories of Jake with things between her and Arthur still uncertain. A camp out on the prairie would serve just fine. Besides, Blackwater seemed a sad and lonesome place all the same, bearing its scars.

She didn’t look back as she headed out of town, into the darkness of the night. She followed the trail to Broken Tree, seeing the fire there from a distance, and saw Arthur visibly relax, putting down his repeater as he recognized Bob and her, sitting back down from where he’d kneeled to shoot. “Job done, then?” he asked.

“Done,” she acknowledged, turning Bob loose to go graze.

“Good. Bagged a couple of rabbits while I was waiting.” He nodded towards a spitted rabbit roasting over the fire. “Ate already myself, that one’s all yours.”

She tore into it without nicety or grace, hungry since they hadn’t eaten since breakfast given the pursuit of Byrd, almost burning her fingers on it. “You rested up some, I hope?”

“Yes, Ma. I’ll be fine.” He made a small, inquisitive gesture with one hand. “How’s things in Blackwater?”

She couldn’t help but be grateful he went right to it, because best they tackle it head on rather than him brooding about it. “Talked with the police chief. Micah’s poster was hanging, along with Bill, Dutch, John, and Javier.”

“He know where Micah is?”

“Ain’t heard nothing of Micah since the day of the ferry job. I think you could walk up to him and he wouldn’t know you. But…” He gestured for her to go on. “He told me some of what happened that day. Nobody in camp wanted to talk about it.”

“Sure they didn’t. Wasn’t nothing nice,” he said, that same exhausted sadness in his tone that had been in Dunbar’s. “Why, what you want to know?”

“If you can say.”

He nodded. “What happened on the boat, I don’t know. None of them would say, so it was bad. And me, what I seen--what I done--that was bad enough. Hosea and me, we’d _told_ Dutch it was a dumb move, didn’t feel right and me, I was glad to be working with Hosea, something that wasn’t gonna involve no shooting. Him and Dutch, they fought like hell about it, Dutch saying he needed me, Hosea saying he had plenty of good gunmen already, and _he_ needed me. Dutch gave way on me working with Hosea, but the ferry? Wouldn’t listen. Hosea and me was clear on the other side of town from the docks, heard the shooting and the screaming starting. We knew the ferry job must have gone sour. Hurried that way to help, found some of our folk pinned down, got them free. One big Goddamn mess, it was. Bullets flying everywhere, dead and injured and frightened folk. We all got split up again. Hosea and me didn’t find the rest of them till we was near to Strawberry already.” His face was turned up, eyes closed, almost as if praying. Maybe praying to forget, though she knew him well enough to know he never would. He inhaled deeply. “I seen plenty of shooting before that. Done some killing. But that day--we seen plenty of bloody days like it over the next six months, but that was the first. Though some part of me knew that after a thing like that, wasn’t no going back. We was never gonna be the same again. We all just spent the next few months lying to ourselves about that.”

Sensing him drowning again in the weight of the past, she tried to offer him a branch to pull him out, if only he could take it. “Dunbar says the police are still undermanned. So plenty of bounties was posted. Maybe it’d help you balance the scales if we take on a few of them?” 

He opened his eyes, and nodded, jaw tense, but she could see a flicker of gratitude in his expression when he looked at her. “Might at that. I reckon I owe Blackwater something, anyway.”

“That’s why you’re a good man. You don’t run from what you’ve done. You face it.”

His answering smile to that was a weary one. “Maybe. I’m running yet, in a way. I gotta lie like hell to keep my neck out of a noose so I can do some good to make up for the bad. Even with Byrd, there I was, spinning tales.” 

“What was that whole George Dupree business, anyway? You think he knew you?”

“Nah. I ain’t never seen him before today. Probably knew a fair amount of bounty hunters got some shadows chasing them. Ran as outlaws themselves, or they was disgraced lawmen, or soldiers who wasn’t able to accept peace. He took a guess with that whole Pozner business, I expect, trying to get me to give up the real story. I gave him that bit of fiction so he wasn’t gonna be inclined to keep digging.” He sighed, rubbing his eyes tiredly. “Sorry. Seems I ain’t particularly pleasant company tonight.”

“Get some rest,” she told him gently as she could. “Good night’s sleep after a rough day helps a lot of things, don’t it?”

“Tent’s yours if you want it.” He gestured to it, rising from where he sat into a crouch, poking the fire again. “It’s a fine enough night I’ll sleep out here, though.”

Was he avoiding sharing space with her, then, by avoiding the tent? True, it would be even more crowded than the bed, given that was big enough they managed just fine in giving each other some space. It only happened a few times that they’d accidentally ended up crossing that in their sleep. She supposed it helped that she’d slept in a bed alone for a year and a half before they’d bought the house in Chuparosa, so she’d gotten used to that rather than having someone else there. But maybe she was overthinking it. Sleeping in a tent got stuffy quickly, and it was a fine night, clear and calm. She looked upward, gesturing to the sky with a sweep of her hand. “It was sweet of you, but you might have put that tent up in vain. I’ll sleep out too. Stars is real pretty tonight.”

That got a genuine smile from him. “Sure is.”

Finishing her rabbit, throwing the bones into the fire to keep the campsite tidy, she licked the last of the grease off her fingers, and snuggled down into her bedroll, gazing up at those stars. She slept peacefully enough herself, and hoped Arthur did the same.

Passing through MacFarlane’s Ranch the next morning, they ended up staying to lunch, but had to beg off staying longer. “We got a cat and dog who we keep leaving with a friend, and I’m sure afraid they might not remember us, we start staying away too long,” Arthur joked, much to Drew’s amusement.

She gave Bonnie a warm hug as they left, glad to see her again. Too far to ride up here regularly just for a social call to friends, true, given it was the best part of a day’s ride from Chuparosa. But if they might be chasing some bounties in southern West Elizabeth over these next months, she couldn’t be sorry for the excuse to drop in on the MacFarlanes.

Back home, they reclaimed Dusty and Dido from Pedro, made the usual inquiries about the upcoming wedding, and headed home. Spent the day taking it easy, getting some shopping and chores done, ordered a wardrobe from Esteban. Playing the cheerful happy couple, and they were, but at the same time, she couldn’t help that growing ache within her. One way or another, she’d have to get an answer from him soon. Her attempt at joking with him about three in a bed hadn’t worked, after he’d educated her on that notion. She’d figured catching him off-balance with that remark might tell her something, but he hadn’t either protested he didn’t want anyone else--and there would have been no reason for him to keep up the pretense when they were alone--or admitted there was someone he did fancy. So that left her no wiser than before.

Maybe she was overthinking all of this. Maybe she was doing it wrong, given she knew her bad habit of too much hesitation and then charging in like a pissed off bull, and she’d hesitated again this time. But she wasn’t charging in now, and trying so hard to fight the impulse to just kiss him and see how he responded. This mattered too much to her. She couldn’t just bluntly drop it all out in the open and be sure it wasn’t all her will, and not his too. But going with half-measures like this left her feeling strangely shy and uncertain. Jake had kissed her walking out in the pasture one day, and that was that. But she couldn’t treat Arthur like Jake anyway, couldn’t expect this to go like that if it was going to happen at all. He wasn’t just some replacement awkwardly jammed into the shape of Jake’s absence, determined to force him to fit. He was his own man, and she’d changed too besides, so if anything would happen, they’d have to find the right path on that.

The wanting and not knowing hurt, leaving her aching and off-balance, not sure where to stand with him, and trying so hard to carefully unpick what words and moves were that of an intimate friendship, and which crossed that particular line. She couldn’t ponder everything she did or said before doing it, or he’d know something was wrong and she’d hurt him that way. But the barrier was there all the same, because she’d put it there, even if he didn’t see it. She’d had to rethink herself, and starting to doubt some of that easy way they had between them was its own kind of pain, because she couldn’t bear to think that it was somehow wrong. But maybe it was, because it could be unstable foundation that would collapse if she ventured too far, and that did neither of them any favors. She couldn’t lose a cherished friend by being stupid and hasty. So if she had to assess and step with more care while still trying to not look like she was, sometimes love meant suffering some personal inconvenience in the interest of not hurting someone. Whether or not he wanted to be her lover, her husband in truth, she loved him in ways that had nothing to do with imagining getting him naked. They had that between them for certain.

She found him on the rooftop after dinner, or more rather, heard him as she came back up the stairs. Practicing his guitar tonight, and she smiled, hearing the sound of it drifting down through the door left open for the breeze. He’d turned out pretty fair at it in the end--not as good as Javier Escuella had been, but then, Arthur was newer to it. Given where he’d started, making awkward jokes about big clumsy hands, she could hear the delicate strums and chords, him humming to himself as he picked through a song. “Lorena”, if she didn’t miss her guess, and she remembered Karen singing it by the fireside.

She turned to head out there and listen, sing along, because they’d done it before, and it made him smile. Music was always something that lived in her soul, brought her joy, and it had been a good thing to take it back. That new song journal was filling up still, and singing on nights like this with Arthur playing his guitar was a fine thing. _Better you singing than me, anyway,_ he’d joked shyly.

But she paused, hand on the doorway. Looked back towards their bedroom, and moved by a compulsion, headed in there, fishing in the nightstand, fingers closing over the familiar flat rectangular shape. Since Christmas, she usually only played now on the rare times she was alone at home for the better part of an afternoon, when she knew he was out at Las Hermanas in the embrace of _El Cactus_. She didn’t have those times of being out alone in the desert hunting anymore, given they tended to hunt together now. But strange enough, she didn’t miss that.

She sat down on the bed, turning the harmonica over in her hands a few times. Glanced upward, wishing she could talk to Jake, ask him about all of this. She’d made people happy with her singing back in Tumbleweed. She’d made Jake happy with the harmonica. But she’d made herself happy by it most of all, the music filling her with light and joy. Some part of her looked at how she’d hid that away all this time, thinking herself too changed to feel anything like that again. Like she didn’t have the right to play it around people and be that person anymore. But she’d felt plenty that she didn’t think she could. _I said that me playing this was yours, Jake, but it was mine all along, wasn’t it? Just got too down on myself to see that._

If she could think about having another husband in her heart and bed, it seemed such a little thing to play this harmonica, and seize that happiness for her own again. It might make Arthur happy too, finally feeling like his gift hadn’t been awkwardly half-rejected, but truth be told, she wasn’t thinking so much about that. That music was hers, nothing to be shamefully hidden away, and the notion of it made that bright joy come to life within her. 

So she headed out for the patio. They’d finally gotten chairs up there, for which her back thanked her. He’d started up another tune, and she sat down, listening for a moment, getting used to his rhythm for it. ”Red River Valley” could be tricky, given most everyone seemed to play it at a different pace. But she got it, and so she brought the harmonica up to her lips, joining in right on the second verse. 

She heard his playing falter at that, saw the astonished look on his face, and wondered if he could see the grin she couldn’t quite help. _Come on, Arthur, just play._ But he recovered, losing only about a line, and by the end of that next verse they’d gotten the hang of it, guitar and harmonica joined together in seamless harmony. It felt good. Felt right. Yes, this was hers again. 

At the end of the song, she fully expected him to ask, and he didn’t disappoint. “Don’t think I’m complaining. You play real pretty. But I thought...you’d said...” 

The question did prod a little too close to home, and she couldn’t help suddenly feeling shy. Should she just have done with it? “I said my only audience had been my husband. Everyone thinks you’re that, so I ain’t exactly made a liar of myself.” But she could be honest with him about this, even if not fully about her change in feelings towards him. “Though it’s mostly that I’m doing it for me. Jake liked listening, but I loved playing. And maybe I ain’t who I was, but that don’t mean I gotta give up all them things I loved.”

He nodded in answer. “There’s sense in that.”

Some part of her did want to ask him if he’d liked it, given he’d said he looked forward to hearing her play. But that shyness came over her at the thought. So maybe she wasn’t quite fully prepared to push on into potential new territory yet either. But things were getting there. 

All in all, she wasn’t sure it mattered tonight. She felt good about this, about herself. Playing music with a friend as fine as him didn’t need to depend on whether or not that longing was there in him too. She couldn’t help but smile at him. “I’ll go find some of my sheet music. We should try and figure out something new.”

~~~~~~~~~~

He woke before Sadie that next morning, and it seemed like they traded that routine off, neither of them particularly inclined to naturally always be the one to wake first. Slipping quietly out of the bed, Dido and Dusty followed, padding out the door and downstairs towards the kitchen. Dusty kept to the foot of the bed, mostly, but of course Dido plunked herself down right between them most of the time. Proud as a queen indeed. He had the feeling she considered the whole bed hers, and that she graciously allowed him and Sadie to sleep there.

Lighting the stove and getting it going, before long he had coffee on, and heard Sadie coming downstairs. The usual routine here too--she’d start breakfast, he’d go clean up first, come help with what was left of the cooking, and he’d start the dishes and the like while she took care of her own wash-up. 

“You think the Cactus appreciates me getting all spruced up?” he joked tiredly. Another two weeks, and here it was again. Dipping a bucket of hot water from the big kettle on the back of the stove, he headed upstairs.

Scrubbing up as best he could, putting on clean drawers, he sat down in front of the mirror, reaching for the razor and soap. Never could get a truly close clean shave himself, like most men, without enough nicks and gouges that it ruined the effect. There was a reason men went to barbers, or wives, for that particular service. But he managed to keep it tamed down to stubble or a close-cropped beard. Better that than running around looking like he’d tried glueing an explosion of shaggy bison fur to his face, anyway.

He could use a haircut too. He could ask Sadie to do it, but might be better to just get Luis Mendoza here in town to handle it. It had been fine before to let her give him a trim, and she did a good job of it. Of course she knew how--she and Jake had been snowed in for months, so remote from everything even when the roads were passable. She’d had to learn how to give a man a haircut and a shave, or else end up living with someone who truly looked like a mountain man.

But he wasn’t Jake, wasn’t her husband, not really. Sitting there and letting her give him a haircut, feeling the soft brush of her fingers through his hair, was just another of those stupid moments where he could lose himself in pretending, dreaming some silly little dream. Listening to her play her harmonica last night, her joking about him being her husband, and knowing she was right, she was doing it for herself, but still, playing that music, he’d felt that pull towards her once again, strong as anything. 

Where had hiding from reality gotten him in all this time? He’d thrown himself into that fantasy of the noble outlaw and so he’d become Dutch’s favored pet, his bulldog trained to attack on command, killing and fighting and robbing and telling himself it was all fine because they were living this grand life against a corrupt social order. Ignoring the many barbs of reality that would puncture that fragile little soap bubble, lying to himself so he could live with himself, and God, he was so sick of it.

Putting down the razor, he looked at himself in the mirror, really and truly looked, much as he hated doing it. _Quit lying. Nothing sadder than a man getting old who’s stubborn about living in his delusion._ He had his share of lines on his face already, that deepening around his eyes too. He’d seen the first threads of grey creeping into his hair back in ‘99--though maybe he was damn lucky he hadn’t gone grey entirely given what a frightful year it had been. Sadie must have seen them there.

The scars, and there were plenty on him even before the last few years, but those ones were bad. The huge knot of scar tissue on his left shoulder from the shotgun slug and the cauterization job, and the shoulder still ached sometimes in the morning, though it’d be worse up in the cold. The constellations of tiny scars stippling his ribs on both sides, a tight cluster of puncture marks from the Cactus, a visible reminder written on his skin of the battered and scarred lungs within. 

At least he didn’t look like a dying scarecrow now, but he was what he was. Nearly thirty-eight years old, and nothing much to show for it except regrets. A man far past his prime; old, sick, used up, ugly bastard. He’d been a bad bargain to both Mary or Eliza when he was barely past twenty, when life had burned far brighter in all its possibilities, so what did he have to offer now to Sadie, to anyone? Nothing. Just more years, more scars, more impossibility given the hole he’d dug himself into went so deep that it might as well have been a canyon. No climbing out of that. He’d had his chances to turn away when he was young, and he’d turned away from the lives he could have led with either of them, before they could inevitably find out exactly how much he wasn’t worth their time. Maybe he’d gained some wisdom on the world since, maybe there was some goodness in him, but that was tied to all those things he could only try to atone for with what time he had. 

He had nothing to offer Sadie. But knowing that didn’t stop the wanting. Like when he was a kid, roaming the streets of one of the wealthier districts of San Francisco some nights. Peering in windows and seeing families in there. Kids who’d never know what it was like to pick pockets or dig through garbage heaps or curl up with a friend simply to keep from freezing. Parents whose eyes skittered right over him as they passed him on the street, like he was nothing but a ghost. Homes, families, all light and warmth and love, knowing none of that was meant for the likes of him, that he was never meant to walk in the front door and be greeted warmly. All he could do was sneak in the servants’ door at the back after everyone went to bed, grab a trinket to sell or a bit of food, and run. Trespass and theft was all he had, never being invited in, never belonging. 

He knew that, but he’d let himself dream hopeless boyish dreams sometimes that someone would come along and want him, take him away from that life. Well, someone had, and look where that got him. Better off than being dead before twenty-one like he probably would have been, true, but he should have been careful what he wished for in the end. Dream turned to a nightmare, and no amount of wishing would turn back the clock. He couldn’t fix any of it. He could only try to balance the scales as best he could, and if that meant things like chasing some bounties for Chief Dunbar in Blackwater and letting Sadie deliver them, so be it. That part of his life made sense.

But he couldn’t spend the next fourteen years again stupidly pining after a woman he couldn’t have. Though with Mary it became easier since he hadn’t seen her. So he could either pack his things and run and burn everything he had with Sadie to the ground, or he could turn and face it, be a man and admit the truth, and deliberately do what he needed to put his life in order. Seemed it was time to ask for some advice. Even admitting that to himself helped restore some measure of calm, so getting through breakfast wasn’t that bad.

Riding to Las Hermanas, sitting outside Felipe’s office, then going in, pulling off his shirt and undershirt, lying there through the pneumothorax session with the Cactus wheezing away, telling Felipe that Sadie was good, fully recovered, all that was comfortable routine now.

Normally he’d rest up for an hour or two, say hello to a few folks, and head home in time to still do some lighter work around the house to end the day. But today, he went looking for Calderón, and found her in the small chapel, busily polishing candlesticks. No matter that she ran this place, she wasn’t above sharing in the work. Wryly he had to admit to himself how many signs he’d missed or ignored in Dutch all those years. “You need another pair of hands for that?” he asked, gesturing to the job.

“A never ending task,” she said, glancing up at him. “I suspect you need to talk, though, so polishing the brass can wait.” He must have given her some kind of quizzical expression, because she smiled, putting the candlestick and rag aside. “I’ve known you long enough, and you look as though you’re troubled by something.”

He sat down, and picked up the polishing job himself, unable to resist. It gave him something to do, anyway, and that was better than just trying to spit it out. “I ain’t so thick I can’t talk and polish brass at the same time, just about.”

“As you like, then.” She sat back, hands resting on her knees. “What’s troubling you?”

“You’re a nun. So I guess the way I see it, you gave yourself over to trying to do good for them as need it. And you seem real happy with that.” She couldn’t fake that contentment, that certainty of knowing her place in things. He’d felt that for a little while in those weeks at Beaver Hollow, when everything turned to a single, crystal clear mission. It became a light within that kept him going even as his body kept further and further failing him: _Save them as you can_. So he had, both in and outside the gang. “That you don’t...need nothing else. There’s something admirable in that, you know? Giving all you got to helping other folk.”

“I didn't imagine you seriously contemplating the religious life.”

“I still ain’t cut out for being a priest or monk, I fear. But you was where I am, once. Coming off years riding as an outlaw. You found this path, for making up for what you done. Made your peace with the notion of paying back what you owe.” 

She gave a deep, slow sigh. “I think you have it wrong, Arthur. The love that brought me to this path found me in my darkest hour, and it brought me to the light again. I was called to serve those who needed me, and I’ve found joy in that. So have you. I’ve seen you, and how much happiness you find in helping others.” 

“It does. It feels real good. But that ain’t the problem. I gotta be OK with that as my life, doing good. Making what amends I can. I’m alive still for that purpose, ain’t I? Seems like I can’t help but keep suffering cause I just can’t accept what is, and what I am, and what I’m meant for.” He heard the crack in his voice. “And I’m _tired_ of hurting myself. I just...I want too much, them things that I’m never supposed to have.” 

“So what is it you want?”

“It don’t matter none, it ain’t meant to--”

She prodded again, voice gentle but insistent. “What is it you want? What would make you truly happy?”

Confession was good for the soul, so they said. She must have heard far darker things than one stupid old fool’s tired hopes. Though he couldn’t help but close his eyes as he said it, not quite wanting to look at her. “Sadie. I want to marry her.” Had he admitted that, even to himself? But what was the point otherwise? She’d been loved by a man who gave her everything he had, so how could he dare to offer her less and expect it was enough? Playing around with committing, calling her his woman, one foot always out the door. He’d seen how happy Bessie and Hosea made each other, wanted that more than anything. He’d marry her tomorrow--today, even--if she’d have him. He just hadn’t dared to even give the notion the tiniest sliver of space to take root, and make everything worse. “Or I guess, if you want the bigger sense, what I always wanted. A wife. Kids. A home. Just--”

“Living as you did as a boy, it makes sense. All of you children ended up being told you had no home, no family, and no place in this world. It’s not so strange that you’d want those things. Or that you worry that you can’t have them.” He nodded, somehow not surprised she managed to find the words to speak what was on his mind and in his heart.

He opened his eyes, glanced carefully her way, though not quite looking up at her face yet. “Thing is--you’re asking what would make me happy. That ain’t the point. I done so much that hurt people. I can do good things and help them as needs it, but what right do I got for wanting more, Calderón? How do I get to say I deserve being happy, having a family, when I ruined other people's lives?” 

She sighed, reached out, patted his shoulder. “We all sin, _hijo_. We’re called to repent, to make things whole as best we can. That includes making ourselves whole. So we’re not meant to live our entire lives in punishment and sorrow. Service given in guilt isn’t worth much. So serve others from love, as I do, as I know you can, and from that sense of rightness and justice. They’re your best guides. And it seems to me perhaps you’ll serve others even better if you’re happy, if you have even more love in your life to draw upon for strength.” Then she lightly swatted his knee, and something in her voice and her expression changed, reminded him of Susan and Bessie about to serve him some much-needed wisdom. In the blink of an eye, she moved from the _Madre_ to the mother, and it was always a neat trick of hers how she could somehow be both. But then, she’d had a husband and a child, once. “So please stop saying you deserve to be lonely and unhappy. You have such a good heart, but you make yourself suffer. You love so much already, and you admit you want to love Sadie as a husband, but you’re frightened of asking to be loved. You have to stop being afraid. You can’t be loved like that if you run from it, and won’t give someone the chance.” 

He almost protested that, but shut his mouth, realizing maybe she called the shot perfectly. “I ain’t exactly had much proof that folk find me worth the bother. Seems smarter to just skip the part where I look like a fool by speaking up.”

“Then you have to believe that you’re worth more than that. Faith, hope, and love, especially after so much pain, are perhaps the bravest things. You chose to open your eyes to the beauty in the world, alongside the ugliness. Now you need to try to do that for yourself. There’s darkness in you, yes, but there’s so much light too, and it’s only grown in the time I’ve known you.” The notion sat strangely, but maybe, just maybe, it could bear weight if he let it. But it felt like getting out of bed in those early months, his body exhausted and unsteady from not having been out doing things. Felt like that sense of doing right, believing in the good in people. It was fragile just now, but maybe it would grow and become stronger. “And I can’t tell you whether she loves you in that way too, but you know that she does love you.”

“I know that. It means more to me than anything, what we already got. So I don’t aim to throw that away, no matter what. I just can’t keep on like I been doing.”

“I wouldn’t imagine so.” 

He looked over at her, now daring to ask. “Did you give me that ring with a mind to me selling it, or was there another notion in your head?”

“I gave it to you for whatever purpose you might need it in your life.” She gave him a mischievous smile. “It’s up to you to decide what that is. Though if nothing happens with Sadie, I hope you don’t give up. It’s something you want. And family isn’t entirely a selfish dream. You could bring happiness to a wife. Raise children who are loved in the way you weren’t. There are many paths that can bring more love into this world, and that’s one of them, don’t you think?”

The idea of kids still felt too big to take in, too many fears and doubts and guilt over Isaac, so if that even became a possibility, he’d have to deal with it in due time. Right now he’d concern himself with the wife bit of the equation first. “So we’re back where we was at that bench at Emerald Station. I gotta believe in myself and take a gamble that love exists, huh?”

“Exactly. But take the time to know yourself for who you are, and what you want. Be prepared for what comes, either way. But yes, when you’re ready, you should tell her.” She smiled at him, fondness and something almost like pride in her eyes and her smile. “And since you offered, we do have another four candlesticks if you’re willing to help.” 

He shrugged, reaching for another one. “Sure. Call it my good deed for the day.” It felt like the least he could do, given she’d somehow straightened him out again.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Sadie’s Journal**  
Brought another bounty in, this time to Blackwater, though it was talking to the madam at Casa Madrugada that set us on that particular quest. I suppose it’s a good thing that it was Mr. Shit-Byrd’s abuse of women that pissed me off rather more than his having rode with Colm O’Driscoll for a couple of months.

I ain’t sure I wouldn’t pass up the chance to kill Colm again though, if only for Arthur’s sake. But he’s dead anyway so that’s something. 

Played the harmonica again, with Arthur on his guitar. It felt good. Something I done for me, really, though it did make him smile. A good night between us, where I could just about forget the feelings I struggle with and just enjoy being there with him. No matter what I hope to not lose that. 

Jake, don’t you never doubt that I loved you with everything within me while you was mine. But I love him too.

Just wish I could resolve that question of him and me. I feel nervous as anything, all full of hope, and then I feel like a fool. But time will tell I guess. Better sooner than later because I can’t keep this up forever. Too bad I ain’t good at them girlish flirtations. Still, seems like he is growing stronger too in knowing himself. I see it when I look at him. So maybe the day will come soon enough where I can risk plain speaking.

We both have grown. It seems more and more like I can recognize myself again. I can live, more or less, with what changes have been wrought in me, because I am myself and what I gone and made of things, rather than the creature constructed of things that was done to me or taken from me. That's gotta be the only way forward. 

( **Tune and lyrics for “Red River Valley”** )  
Collection notes: Bought the sheet music for this in Strawberry a few years back. Also taken down from Arthur who says he heard Uncle singing it in camp.

Personal notes: It’s a beautiful song, one of them “forlorn farewell” types, and the tune is sweet. But I truly am hoping it’s not an omen of things to come with some of the lyrics that he chose to play it. Though we neither of us sang it, we only played. Besides, Arthur admits he rarely knows an entire song’s words, and I heard that often enough in camp. (Along with the fact that his ability to keep time in his singing may go to hell by various degrees if he’s been drinking. ~~Does that say anything about what he’d be like in bed after a few drinks, I wonder?~~ ) Maybe I should take some comfort in “Come sit by my side if you love me/do not hasten to bid me adieu” though.

 **Arthur’s Journal**  
I truly have no idea why Calderón seems determined to keep helping me just when I need it. Guess that history of trying to save street brats means she won’t deem me a lost cause no matter that I am long past being a kid.

So I got some more home truths from her to chew over. I am for this world a while yet, or so I hope, and perhaps now she deemed me ready to think about some of these things. 

I was Dutch’s favorite tool for all them years, and then when I was broken and no longer of use, I got thrown out. Or abandoned to die on a mountain more properly. I got far too used to seeing me only as the things I can do, or in this case what I thought I should do. I need to be more than an instrument of good deeds. There are others that see me as more than that so I shall strive to do the same. But it ain’t easy to undo over thirty years of one way of thinking overnight. But seems I can change as I went and done it already. All I needed was the right spark. 

Whether Sadie wants me like that or not, I don’t know. But seems in the end I love her all the more for her seeing something in me worth saving when even I couldn’t. Which makes her sound like some delicate saint but it’s not that at all. She’s lived this crazy life alongside me, matched me shot for shot for both lead and liquor. She’s fine and foul-mouthed and tough and amusing and kind, and she ain’t no angel, just one of the best women I have ever known. I told her that all the way back when we rescued Abigail and I meant it then, and mean it still now.

Maybe it’s in our wanting and loving things that we really find we are human rather than animals, and that brings out both the worst and best in us. 

So time to try to be better still than I am, and take that gamble. Compared to such fearfully high stakes as we had back in the Hollow, this should come easy. But it’s closer to the heart all the same. All this time I been trying to be a sinner turned saint, just about. Trying to only be a man, and the best one that I can, is messy as hell but I expect I will be better for it in the end regardless. 

( **Sketch of Sadie playing her harmonica** captioned, “So I finally heard her play, and her playing is fine. But not half so fine as the woman herself. No wonder Jake couldn’t help but love her. It’s been a hell of a thing seeing her this year after we left Las Hermanas. Seen her coming back into her own, or becoming who she is now, or some of both? Either way, she’s truly something.”)


	22. Chuparosa I: Further Questions Of Life Philosophy II

The desert sprang to life in April, wildflowers blooming everywhere, and Sadie had agreed to go get some as a favor to Juanita on her wedding day. Of course, it didn’t hurt to double up on her getting things done, and taking Sarah out for some shooting practice while they were at it got that accomplished also. Besides, it was good for her to get out from Las Hermanas. She remembered how much Arthur had craved that, even if he wouldn’t say so.

“You’re looking good these days,” she told Sarah, comparing her to a year ago now. Standing there in the spring sunlight, there was a glow in her eyes, and the dull ashy undertone had faded from the deep ochre of her skin. She looked like an ordinary nineteen-year-old girl, and that thought brought its share of contentment. Even compared to Christmas, she tired less easily now.

Sarah smiled at that, beaming brightly. “Dr. Garcia thinks maybe if I’m lucky, I only gotta stick around for about another year for my treatments.” 

Doing better than Arthur on that score, given Felipe guessed he’d need another two or three years himself, but then, Sarah had come to Mexico a lot earlier in her TB than Arthur had. She’d had to spend less time on total bed rest, plus she was younger. It made sense that she’d progress faster. “Thought about what you wanna do after that? I know you was reluctant to go back to Lemoyne.” She nodded towards the battered tin cans set up in the distance. “Have you a go at those, now.”

Sarah put the repeater to her shoulder, bracing it, and Sadie saw her exhaling slowly, squeezing the trigger. “Been thinking about it. Lemoyne is Lemoyne. Ways changing there don’t come easy. You know how things is there.”

“I do?”

Putting down the gun, Sarah shot her a look. “Black folk gotta play stupid, maybe, but that don’t make it so. You respect me enough to teach me to fight, don’t think you gotta lie to me about things. We put some pieces together, Ma and Papa and me. You don’t need to worry none. Any folks would need to have been in Lemoyne then, and known you and Mr. Arthur as good as we do now. Not like we’re gonna go hurry and run to the law.” She gave a wry little smile. “We know the law don’t care much about us anyhow. Was three years ago now that Sheriff Grey arrested my cousin Willie. Supposed to have ‘violated’ some white woman, cousin of them Greys. Mob got all outraged about that supposed indignity, came and got Willie from the jailhouse in Rhodes one night. Lynched him barely a quarter mile from town. Sheriff not only let them do it, he was part of it.” Sarah stared at her, gaze level and defiant. “Willie didn’t never do anything like that. He was such a shy boy. Wouldn’t barely talk to any girls at all, let alone a white woman, let alone raise a hand to one. So if whoever you was running with shot that miserable Sheriff Grey, well, then be assured there wasn’t many of us crying about that up in Scarlett Meadows.”

Caught out on that, she had to admit she’d misjudged. “I wouldn’t recommend living the outlaw life. Sounds romantic enough in some ways, I guess, but at the end of the day, you’re sleeping on the ground, being hunted, trying to live with things you done too. Killing don’t solve problems. I ain’t denying your folk got them, mind.” She’d seen enough of it in Lemoyne when she was out and about. Things there were different from both New Austin and Ambarino. Long memories and long grudges and resentments, an ugly mood ready to explode into violence at the merest touch. “But you start killing every person who don’t see you as equal, you never stop. Especially since you’re a woman too.”

“I know that.” She brought the gun up again, took another shot. Missed that one, instead taking a chip out of the rock the can sat on. She made an irritated click of her tongue. “Didn’t account for that wind right, did I? Longer shot like that.”

“You get a feel for it. Try again.”

“I aim to defend myself and mine, that’s all. I ain’t picking no fight, at least not with lead.”

“What you mean by that?”

“I read this book by this colored woman, Mrs. Wells-Barnett. Talking all about things as is in the South, the lynching, the lies, the way we ain’t really no better than the slaves our folk was forty years ago. And I thought maybe that’s the way to do it. Drag it out into the daylight so that they can’t hide their doings no more behind darkness and white hoods. TB’s awful, but it went and given me a whole new life all the same. Lemoyne ain’t a place for me or my folks no more. I can read and write, I can shoot, I lived in this place where I can look folks in the eye. I got tools to fight with now. Can’t go back to looking at the ground and mumbling apologies for things I ain’t even done.”

“You can’t. I couldn’t go back to playing Miss Meek and Mild neither once I realized things could be different.”

“So maybe we’ll head north. Go to Chicago. Mrs. Wells-Barnett is there. Other folk too with a mind to change things. See what I can do with that.” She took another shot, and hit the can squarely this time, grinning at that. Then she sobered again. “And, well, Javi won’t have a place in Lemoyne neither, but we sure can’t stay in Nuevo Paraiso with Del Lobo folk coming after him as some kind of traitor.” 

Sadie well understood what was being said there. “Seems to me your folks like him. He’s a good kid. Works hard, treats folk kindly.” She sighed, glancing off towards the east. “You ain’t wrong that he’s gotta get out, though. Can’t live on the run forever, and well, outlaw gangs don’t take kindly to them as they see as betrayers.” She gestured towards the repeater. “Reload, let’s go again. Them cans is still standing.”

Sarah did just that, taking another couple of shots. Then she turned back to Sadie. “What gangs do to their enemies. You seen that.” Sadie nodded. “Tell me.” 

“You sure?” But then she remembered that Sarah was no sheltered flower. What had likely been done to her cousin, and others, was grisly. “You want the truth? The Van Der Lindes, they shot this one girl, burned the body besides so she didn’t have no decent burial. And as outlaws went, we was kind in comparison to others. O’Driscolls, the one I saw, they pulled out his eyes, cut off his head, tied him on his horse and sent him into our camp holding his head in his hands. Lemoynes went on and on about fighting for some genteel and civilized South all while they was hanging and castrating and burning their enemies. Murfrees? Jesus, I ain’t sure they qualify for human. They tortured anyone they could get their hands on. So if them Del Lobos get Javi, no, it ain’t gonna be pretty. They beat him soundly enough at Christmas but you know that was just the beginning.” He’d been unconscious besides, and beaten black and blue. 

“I know.” Sarah let out a sigh of frustration. “And I ain’t sure I can ask him to stay here another year. Not safe. And Papa, he’s already let the land go back home. Sharecropping, we was, so wasn’t like we owned it outright, but still, we ain’t even got that now. So he’s been talking about going to Chicago now. Taking Javi with him.”

“Seems like Paul sees him as a son already.” Sadie gave Sarah a conspiratorial glance. “That’ll come in handy, I reckon?”

Sarah’s shy grin was answer enough. “We know it’s gonna be a few years. Gonna have to get settled up in Chicago and all. Have to be careful having babies too, sounds like, once we actually is married. Won’t be able to nurse them myself, Dr. Garcia says. The TB and all. Don’t want to risk passing it on.” 

“But you can still have them. And you’re young yet. Though I know waiting is frustrating as hell. My first husband and me had to wait eight years to marry. The money wasn’t there.”

“Eight years?” Sarah looked at her in astonishment. “My Lord. How did you not die? Javi kisses me and it’s about all I can do to not grab him by the hand and--” Sadie couldn’t see it on Sarah’s dark skin, but she could well suspect the girl was blushing, and she tried to hide an instinctive grin at it. “Well.” She straightened the collar of her blouse self-consciously.

“Hopefully you and your momma have had that talk,” she teased Sarah.

“Oh, we have.” She made a face. “Real awkward, it was.”

“You’re near a woman yourself now. I know how things is when you’re making that jump. Like a horse kicking at the traces. Gotta find your own way, your own life, and you’re impatient with your momma holding you back, trying to tug the reins too much for your taste. But take it from me. We don’t appreciate a mother enough until she’s gone. There’s...a lot I wish I could ask mine, just now.” Though Calderón did a hell of a job filling that gap, Sadie had to admit. But still, the thought of talking to May Griffith would have been such a comfort, being able to ask her about life, about Arthur, about a lot of things. Maybe she and Caroline wouldn’t have broken apart so hard as they had for those few years, with their mother left alive to help still pull them together. “Guess you ain’t never too old to need her for some things. And yours, well, she’s had to survive some things. She was maybe born in slavery, I’m guessing.”

“Got sold away from her ma up in South Carolina when she was six. Ain’t never found her again. She looked for years. I think that was the worst thing. The not knowing.”

“I’m sure she loves you all the more for it. Look what she done. She fought to find a place to bring you to help keep you alive. She come here with you to keep you safe. Learned to read and write too, so she’s made something new of herself too. There’s things she can tell you that nobody else will, about your kin, about being a woman, a colored woman to boot.”

Sarah nodded slowly at that, a thoughtful expression on her face. “You got that right, I suppose. Though,” that awkward expression crept back, “if it’s all the same, I’d rather not ask her too much about bed business.”

“Well, that’s fair. We don’t none of us want to much dwell on our folks getting up to that. So, what exactly you want to know?” She reached out, put an arm around Sarah’s shoulders with a laugh, drawing her in. “Trust me, long engagements test your patience, but there’s plenty you two can get up to without risking a baby. Plus young fellas being impatient as they are, good for them to learn a thing or two that they can use even after the wedding. You should be enjoying it as much as he does.” 

Sarah gave another of those grins. “Well, he ain’t asked me yet, but I think he will, before he and Papa go. And I suppose if Mr. Pedro and Miss Juanita can wait so long to find each other, and you and Arthur managed too, it ain’t the worst thing to have to wait a few years.”

“You calling me old?” She’d be thirty-three in a couple of weeks, anyway. Not exactly a spring chicken as things went. She felt that more and more some days, but the anger and panic of feeling like her best years had slipped by while she’d been kept waiting had faded. Watching people die, all too often without sense or reason, helped put that in perspective. All she had was the time she’d been given, and no point mourning things that hadn’t been. She’d make the best of what years she had left.

“No!” Her eyes went wide in alarm. “Well, not exactly. Just that--things has been hard for you already. Sick as he was, you wasn’t sure when you married Arthur if you’d lose him. And you’d lost one man already. But you still took the chance.” She sighed. “I knew I couldn’t lose him at Christmas. How--you and Arthur, how did you know that?”

“That I couldn’t lose him?” She neatly ducked the question of love and admitting it. “I let him go off to die as the man he wanted to be, cause that was what he wanted most. To help other folk live, and be happy, at any cost. And then I found him alive instead. Barely, but if he could survive all he did, do the good things he done, how could I not fight for that? After that, it all seemed pretty clear.” In terms of what to do and the need to keep him alive, anyway. It was only now that things seemed so muddy and uncertain. 

”And you ain’t been apart since.”

“No.” She could let herself admit now what a comfort it had been to have him there, even as far back as Horseshoe Overlook and his uncertain, awkward attempts to console her. She couldn’t trust him then. After the O’Driscolls the last thing she’d wanted to look at was another man, and it was obvious around camp that he was Dutch’s most trusted and skilled man. She’d known he didn’t earn that place by playing dominoes. A big, strong man that capable of violence should have been the last person she turned to, and yet, she watched him. Riding out, coming back with food, cash, valuables. Walking around camp with kind words for everyone, trying to buck up their spirits. Taking little Jack fishing, and the boy had been so incredibly excited about going out with his Uncle Arthur he’d gone on about it for days. Slowly, he’d proven he wasn’t what he seemed, or at least, there was far more to him than that. By the time he found them in Lakay, she’d known if there was one man she could depend upon, it was Arthur Morgan, and even sick and dying as he was, he hadn’t disappointed. He was still doing that now, rock-steady and reliable.

“Thing is, if I let him go to Chicago for a year or two, guess I could always go up there and find he don’t love me no more. That we both changed enough while we was apart.”

“Maybe. I changed from who I was with Jake to who I am now. Arthur’s changed too from when I first met him. You can’t live your life here in Las Hermanas, both of you, just to have things be like they are now. Life is short, and sometimes...sometimes you gotta take that leap. If it’s meant to be, you’ll find a way.”

“Suppose you’re right on that.” Sarah gave a shy smile at that, and Sadie couldn’t help but smile at it too. 

“How about you go get them cans and we’ll go find Juanita’s flowers?” She gave a roguish grin. “Give you some notions of how to handle young Javi too before he heads to Chicago--better you know some things and deal with it that way than risk getting pregnant. I wouldn’t recommend you getting frisky in the convent, though.” She winked. “Stable hayloft, though…” As Sarah laughed and headed for the rocks in the distance, she looked down at her hand, at the thin gold band there. _Practice what you preach, Sadie Adler._ All that talk about taking a risk, and letting a thing come to pass if it should. True, she’d wanted to protect Arthur from being hurt once again, even by her. But he wasn’t a child to shelter him from her feelings. He wasn’t the man he’d been two years ago, or even six months ago. She had to believe that if he was strong enough to bear the weight of all he had, to keep coming into his own, that his heart wasn’t so fragile as she’d feared. She could tell him how she felt, and make it clear that she only wanted him if he wanted that too.

 _I love you, Jake. I’ll see you again someday too. But I gotta keep living. I need to try, at least._ She went to pull the ring off, and hesitated. Not from guilt, as such. That ring had been a promise made, to be only his until death parted them. She had, she’d loved him until then, and beyond, and would for the rest of her life. But love wasn’t a thing to be parceled out carefully, afraid she only had so much of it. Calderón was right. Jake wouldn’t want her to be miserable, and she wasn’t replacing him. She wasn’t being unfaithful. Jake was gone, and she might have decades left. She was different now herself, and that needed a different kind of man. 

She’d remember Jake, always and always, and the good memories between them would stay as the finest of songs in her heart. She didn’t need to wear this ring as a token forever for that. It felt like if Arthur needed any sign at all, that would be a good one. 

But the untanned band of skin there, the faint indent--people would notice it at the wedding for sure. She didn’t want to answer those questions. At least, not before she and Arthur talked. This needed to be between them first.

So she left the ring on, for now. _I’ll take it off in the morning. Put it away. And I’ll talk to Arthur then._ Tonight was for Pedro and Juanita, and she’d go find the finest flowers she could for a woman who deserved every happiness. It had been years since she’d been to a wedding even before her own, given they became rarer with people leaving Tumbleweed rather than staying there. It would be nice to see one again. If tonight brought up memories, she would use them to cherish for what she’d shared with Jake, but be ready to tuck that away, neat and safe, for whenever she needed them. She’d let herself be happy tonight, caught up in a friend’s joy, having the memory herself of having been loved so completely, and in the hope of having something that beautiful again. Maybe she would, maybe she wouldn’t, but she had a damn good man in her life either way. 

“Yell out if you find some blue flowers,” she called to Sarah. “She should have those in her bouquet for luck.”

~~~~~~~~~~

He didn’t have a map ready to hand, so he didn’t recall the full course of the San Luis. But to judge from the fast current and overflowing banks at Rio Del Toro, somewhere up along the river, spring snowmelt fed and flooded it. “Cooler water and current--good trout fishing, that.”

He glanced back over his shoulder at Javi, standing there looking uncertain. He gave an awkward shrug. “I don’t know nothing about fishing.” His English had grown by leaps and bounds, and he’d insisted on speaking English to Arthur every time they talked now.

“Well, neither did I till someone taught me, so no time like the present.” Javi nodded at that, heading for his horse and grabbing his fishing pole. “Besides, I figure you gotta get out of Las Hermanas sometimes. You gotta be going about as crazy as us lungers, just itching to go somewhere.” He’d barely been out of the convent walls since Christmas, and Sadie had taken Sarah off to do some shooting practice, so he figured he’d go take the boy somewhere, and fishing seemed like a good option. 

“Not so easy,” Javi acknowledged.

Showing him a few of the basics about baiting, casting, and the like, they settled down on the bank. “Keep reeling it in, gradual and slow. Makes it look like an insect or a little fish on the move, see? The fish, they want to hit a moving target.”

“Your _padre_ \--your father--he teach you this?” Javi asked.

“No. About the only things my daddy ever taught me was how to take a punch and how to pick a pocket.” 

“Never knew mine. Dead before I was born.” He shrugged, as if it didn’t matter, but of course it did. “Or so my mother told. Maybe he run off. Maybe she didn’t know who he was. She died when I was seven. I ended up living with a miller.” Javi gave a tight-lipped smile. “A boy is cheaper than a burro, yeah?”

“So you run off from him, I expect.” It was easier to talk about these things alone, away from the crowd at the convent. He and Javi had talked some before he left at Christmas, given eight months sharing that place as home, but it was hard to know what to say, how much to dare to reveal for either of them. Then after he let and was at Las Hermanas only every couple of weeks, usually, it got even tougher. He’d seen far more of Sarah, out running errands regularly to Chuparosa, than he had Javi Arcadio, kept in his protective adobe prison.

“I run when I was thirteen. I ended up in the slums of Escalera.”

“I watched my daddy get hanged when I was eleven. Lived on the streets of San Francisco after that. You live like that, being taken in by a gang seems like a step up. Ain’t like you’ve lived an honorable life, and at least you ain’t alone no more.”

“That what happened to you?” Javi knew he’d been an outlaw, so no point hiding the details. If he could do one thing, maybe it was using what he’d suffered and learned to help set one young man straight long before he went to hell as badly as Arthur had.

He switched to Spanish. “You’ve done enough English for a while. Easier for you to talk like this, yeah?” Besides, it would let him pick his own words with some more care. “Two men found me. Took me in. I was fourteen. I was the first, but a lot more come after me. It wasn’t like the Del Lobos. All business. We was--family. You’re young, kid. Twenty-one.” A little older than Arthur thought, but some of that was that he was slim and short and overall boyish looking. But still very young for all that. “I had some chances to get out when I was your age. I had a girl I loved. A chance to have a family.” He wouldn’t explain Isaac, or Eliza. That was his, and Sadie’s, at this point. “I walked away from that, cause I was afraid. I didn’t know what it was like, living a good life. Didn’t know that I could do it. So I stuck to what I did know. Robbing and shooting and all of it.”

“That why you didn’t shoot me when you killed Bernardo and the rest?”

“Yeah.”

“That was a gamble. I could have been even meaner than all of them.”

“See, now, you forget,” he cast his line again, “I been that age. I remember it. You may pretend it, but you ain’t so tough, you’re scared mostly. Trying so damn hard to do whatever it takes to prove you’re a man, cause inside you don’t _believe_ you’re a man. Not just yet. Mostly you don’t know for sure what the hell ‘be a man’ even means.” Trying so hard to balance everything, terrified and elated by all the possibilities suddenly in the world, and mostly just scared sick of failing, being exposed for a boy and a worthless fraud besides. He’d screwed up far more than he’d gotten right at that age, that was for damn sure. “Don’t help that you’d probably ask a dozen men, and get you a dozen different answers by it.”

Javi was clever enough to ask, at least, rather than insist he knew. “So what’s your answer?”

He had to think about it himself, because trying to put it into words was no easy thing. “Some would say you prove you’re a man by how you hold your liquor, or how many women you bed, or how many men you kill. Fighting, drinking, screwing--ain’t about that. Being a man? It’s about choosing your way. Facing the things you done without no excuses, and owning the things you want without lying to yourself about wanting them or why. Knowing what you love, what’s worth your fighting for, and deciding what mark you’re gonna leave before you die.”

“That’s not a bad way to look at it.” Javi yanked the fishing pole, setting the hook, and carefully started reeling in. “Might sound rude, but why is it you care about me? Am I some chance for redeeming yourself or what?”

“Maybe.” He couldn’t deny there was some of that to it. He could see some of Lenny in the boy, left alone and angry, feeling there was no place in the world but to fight. God, the boy should have been so much more than a fifty-buck outlaw, and the loss of all the ways that mind of his could have changed the world still hurt, as did losing a good kid like him.

Kieran too, awkward and strangely gentle, looking only for somewhere to belong. Saving Arthur’s hide at Six Point Cabin, and then he’d repaid that with quips and grumbles and off-handed insults, a few moments of politeness and honesty. Then the O’Driscolls caught him and sent his mangled corpse as a message, and he couldn’t save one young man who’d left a gang he’d never really wanted to be in, but maybe this time he could. He could try to repay Kieran that way, by degrees of separation, because there was no other way now. Eagle Flies, furious and desperate and wanting only to see his people with a hope of a future, caught in Dutch’s web and cast aside when he was deemed a broken and useless thing. Himself, young and furious and afraid, so glad to have been offered any chance to belong and be cared for that he’d have done anything for it, and had. “Watched my share of young men die for no reason, cause they thought that the gun was the only way they had. Hell, I figured I’d end up shot full of holes myself. But there was those too who had another path, who made those they looked after into their pride. I only wish I’d seen their way younger than I did. It could have spared me a lot of suffering. Spared a lot of other folk the cost of my being that blind for so long.”

Javi cast him a sidelong look, and gave him a slight smile. “For a man who isn’t that old, you sound like one.”

He couldn’t help but grin sheepishly at that, enjoying that Javi felt comfortable enough to risk giving him some shit. “Ain’t ready for a long grey beard just yet. But I gone and lived a lot in the time I’ve had. And near dying, well, that’ll give you some wisdom beyond your years.”

“It’s not bad advice, mind.” Javi finished reeling in his trout, holding it up for inspection with a look of inquiry.

“Well, thank you very much, Mr. Arcadio. And you might as well keep that one, he looks real fine.”

Javi tucked it away in the creel, looking back towards the river. “We’ll need more of them to help feed the wedding.” They’d volunteered to let that be their contribution.

“Be a lot easier if we could just roast a pig or a steer.” He felt the nibble on his own line, and set the hook.

“It’s Lent. Most people have given up meat until Easter, and that’s this Sunday.”

He resisted the urge to point out that he’d been in Mexico almost a year and a half now, and he’d grown at least passingly familiar with some of the religious observations, not to mention he was aware when Easter was. His tongue-in-cheek humor obviously hadn’t translated well. “Sure. Well, then let’s keep on fishing.”

“You’re not wrong. That whole ride to Barranca, I was thinking a lot of things. I figured I wouldn’t make it out alive.”

Putting his own fish in the creel, he glanced over at the boy. “So what was the one thing you wanted to change most?”

His answer, when it came, was almost shy. “Not so much change as being sad I’d miss out on things. I thought about Sarah.” 

Twenty-one, in love, now there was a familiar feeling. The best and worst of times, indeed. “Well, if the last thing you was thinking of was love, that’s not so bad.” 

“What about you? Sadie said you almost died.”

“Damn near. I suppose I was hoping them as I loved would have good lives, that this wouldn’t be the end of them. It was for far too many folk.”

“What about your wife?”

Shit. He’d gotten caught out on that. “Her too, of course. God knows all I want is for her to be happy. Ain’t only love in a marriage that’s worth thinking about, though. But love--that’s the best thing we got in this world. You lose your pride, health, strength, money, all of that? If you still got love on your side, you can keep going long past when you should give out. It’s the thing worth keeping, worth the fight.”

A lot of Dutch’s words had been bluster and gilded bullshit, but still, there were a few nuggets of true gold in there all the same. _Don’t you never leave love aside, Arthur. It’s all we got._

Hosea too, urging John, _We all gotta die, but love...love is the thing. The only thing._ “So, you aim to marry her?”

“I want to.” Javi gav a boyish grin. “I’ll ask her soon. Her family seem to like me, and well...I know it’s the right thing, you know?”

He couldn’t help but smile at it, that sense of happiness radiating from him suddenly at the thought of her. “Yeah. Of course. Look, you got a bad start, but you turned it around a lot already. You’re a literate man now. Good with horses for sure, and that’s always going to be useful.”

“I can’t stay at Las Hermanas.”

“Well, you can’t go out much either.” He gestured to the guns on his belt. “Hell, Calderon only let you out cause she knows I can handle it.”

“Wait, she knows about you?”

Arthur shot him a look, raising an eyebrow. “She knows plenty about a lot of things, boy. Don’t let that habit and wimple fool you. You might want to ask her for some advice before you take your leave for good.” 

“All right, all right. But I can’t stay forever.”

“Well, you fit right in with us for a couple months after Christmas,” he joked. “Them cracked ribs and all. You know if any folk was going to be sympathetic about not being able to breathe deep or without pain, it’s gonna be a bunch of lungers.”

Javi laughed at that, long and loud. “They were very kind. But Sarah has to stay another year at least for her treatments. She wants to go to Chicago after that. See what possibilities we can find there.”

He let out a low whistle. “Big city? You folk are braver than me, sure. I never see one of them again, don’t think it’ll bother me all that much.”

“More possibilities for folks without white skin in some cities,” Javi pointed out.

“You got me there.”

“Mr. Landry and me are thinking to leave this summer. Go get settled, find jobs. When Sarah’s free to leave, she and Mrs. Landry can come join us.”

That surprised him a bit, hearing the boy already had something of a firm plan in place. “What kind of work you thinking?”

“Not sure. Whatever we can get, I expect, though all of us being able to read and write now can’t much hurt.”

“So her momma and daddy like you enough for that, huh?” He reached out, gave Javi a light tap on the shoulder with his first. “Congratulations, boy, getting her folks to approve of you is no small thing.” But they’d seen him for months at Las Hermanas, both the half-wild scared outlaw boy Arthur and Sadie had dragged in, and who he’d become, given a chance. They’d gotten a good chance to judge his true quality. “Glad you got a place to go, and a way to get out of here.”

“Me too. But I want to ask her to marry me before we leave. I’ll wait for her. As long as it takes.” He glanced over at Arthur almost defiantly, as if daring him to laugh or say that he was too young to know better, that he hadn’t sowed enough wild oats. 

He could almost hear Dutch at that. _First love is something truly special, all right. I remember mine. Miss Georgina Wilder. But, Arthur, are you really sure about this? You’re so young, son. Take it from a man who’s been around the racetrack a few times--you never forget your first love, but you’re rarely meant to be with her. Besides, if you leave us, you know there ain’t no replacing you._

Maybe Dutch wasn’t wrong that he and Mary weren’t meant to be. But thinking back, he could see how the carefully barbed hooks Dutch had used to reel him back in too. _Her family don’t like you. But we do. They’ll never love you or understand you like us. And you want to give that up?_

If Javi and Sarah were meant to be, good for them. If they weren’t, time would tell. As was, he could see no reason to advise against it. “She’s a fine girl, Sarah. And her folks are good people.” Seemed the boy had found a family who would value him, keep him safe, count him as one of their own. He couldn’t help but feel a sense of relief at that. He hadn’t taken a kid from a gang and left him trapped in a convent without direction or hope. “You’re both real young yet. Waiting a couple of years will be hard, but it’ll get you both on better footing to start a life together.” 

“I’ll have to work on my proposal,” he said with a nervous, joking laugh.

“Just be honest. She loves you. Ain’t no point not sounding like yourself for something that important.”

_”Thing is, when you and me are together, it’s like anything seems possible.” His one hand behind his back was clenched in a fist, clutching that ring for dear life. Jesus, he was sweating already, and it was October in northern California. “You gotta feel that too, Mary.”_

_“Oh, Arthur, of course I do. I think about you all the time.”_

_“And I know your daddy don’t like me,” though the Godawful Daddy was a fuming asshole in Arthur’s opinion but he knew she loved and respected the bloated turd like nobody else, “and...I know you said you can’t never marry nobody he don’t approve of.” He felt his throat go tight for a moment. He surreptitiously tried to wipe his hands on his trousers before he held out the ring to her. “So I’m asking for...hope, I guess. That you’ll wait for me. That maybe you believe there’s a chance I can make him like me.” He didn’t know exactly what to do, because how in hell did someone become **likable** anyway, especially to the likes of Francis Gillis, a mediocre accountant too big for his britches from everything Arthur heard. But he had to try, had to be better than he was, because he couldn’t lose Mary. “I got that with honest money, I swear to you.” Somehow it seemed more important than anything that she know that, though he wouldn’t talk about how much horseshit he’d had to shovel to buy it._

_Sitting on the splintery wooden steps of Eliza’s boarding house, her awkward with the round swell of her stomach, and he couldn’t help but keep glancing, as if not sure the whole thing wouldn’t disappear if he looked away long enough. He couldn’t remember a single damn thing from that night between buying her another drink and waking with a splitting headache in an unfamiliar bed, startled shitless to realize he was buck naked and had a woman beside him. But it had happened, and here was the proof. A baby. His child. He’d wanted that so much with Mary, and now it was happening with a woman he couldn’t remember, though thank God he at least recalled her name. Eliza McCready. She’d had such a pretty smile that night._

_“Ain’t got no family to go to,” she said. “I thought I’d never see you again, truth be told.”_

_“We can get married,” he said softly. “Today, even. Gotta be some kind of justice of the peace around here. It won’t matter none to my family how it happened. They’ll be real happy to have you, I promise. Susan and Bessie, they’ll be thrilled to have another woman around.” Everything moving so fast, terrifying him, but she was pregnant and all he could do was make that right. She’d lived the last months scared shitless herself, it was only that he was getting all of that fear and resolve in one huge whacking dose of about ten minutes._

_“They your aunts, then?” There was a glimmer of hope in her grey eyes._

_“Sort of. It’s Dutch, Susan, Bessie, Hosea, and me, and well, John now.” He wouldn’t think about the brat making fun of him for this. Could threaten to drown him a in a creek, given the boy could probably drown in a puddle. Though Hosea would be disappointed in him for even making the joke._

_Her brow furrowed. “All that? Which one of them’s your folks?”_

_“All of them, really, except John. He’s my brother.” Unfortunately._

_“What are they, one of them strange Mormon families all married to each other?”_

_“No, they took me in when I was a kid.” He looked over at her, gathering his nerve. “I’m...well, I’m an outlaw. We all are.”_

_The way she suddenly reared back, eyes narrowed, the hand protectively cupping her belly, he might as well have said he was a leper. Her tone was polite, but firm. “No, sir, then you and me made a mistake that night, and it’s kind of you to offer to marry me. Your life is your own, but I don’t need none of that outlaw business around my child. We’ll be fine. You can be on your way.”_

_Jesus. She’d rather go it alone, shunned and whispered about, her child labeled a bastard without a father, and if that wasn’t about as low as a man could feel, he didn’t know what was. “All right. There’s no arguing that I’m a bad lot. But there’s gotta be something I can do that helps you and the kid both. Just...just tell me what I can do to make it right. As right as I can, anyway.”_

He’d had two women now in his life tell him that he wasn’t worth it. Or, if he was being truly honest, trying to get over that initial inclination of the full pain of the rejection, they’d been telling him that he didn’t fit into the lives they wanted to lead.

He looked over at Javi, young and bright and full of hope. Wished for a moment he could turn back the clock to that, make his life into something so very different. Though he doubted he and Mary would have made each other happy, and chances were he and Eliza might not have done so well either. They’d always respected each other, but he’d always felt a bit like an interloper at that cabin anyway, tolerated mostly for Isaac’s sake. Always afraid that she’d decide even that was too much, and tell him to not come back, or that he’d find she’d taken up with a man who could give her a good life and be a real father to Isaac, and he’d have to bear walking away to do what was right. He had to wonder if he’d left the gang and they’d married if the resentment would have crept in of opportunities sacrificed, feeling stuck.

He hadn’t been ready then to take control of his life. But he’d fought for that, and won it, at a fearful cost. Things were different with Sadie too. They’d made something together already, without even trying for it. Somehow the shape of her had fit into his life, and he’d fit into hers, and the thought of losing that hurt more than anything, because he didn’t even know where to start to disentangle all of it. They’d simply happened, well in the middle of that growing together, before he even realized it. _She knows who you were, ugly as that was. But she sees who you are, and maybe who you can be, and somehow she believes in that._

He wasn’t twenty-one, but maybe he wasn’t too old for the spark of hope. If a kid like Javi could get his shit together and be sure, how could he call himself a man either if he wasn’t willing to do what he’d said, admit what he wanted, and treat love as the most precious thing he could have? Whatever kind of love it was, it was there, but he had to know for sure. So he’d have to take that risk.

He’d never been to a wedding before. Hosea and Bessie had been married already by the time they found him, and nobody in the gang had ever married in his entire time there. Well, Trelawney, but he was only there sometimes, and he hadn’t even known the man had a wife and family until stumbling across that secret in St. Denis. They’d never pulled a scam at a wedding either, which seemed a bit like a surprise when he thought about it, given they’d scammed damn near every other festive occasion, including accidentally stumbling on a christening during a robbery. Hosea had ended up accidentally becoming a godparent out of that one.

He hoped the Trelawneys were well, and Josiah, slippery as ever, had escaped the trap one last time. He hoped John had done right by Abigail and married her for real, that wherever they and Jack were right now, they were happy. 

Pedro and Juanita weren’t all that young either, lost so many years to stumbles and missteps, but they’d seized their chance for happiness all the same with both hands, and he had no doubt they’d be happy together. Might be nice to see his first wedding, try to let go of the ghost of those failed paths that could have been, and let himself indulge in a couple of dreams.

He’d talk to Sadie tomorrow. He had a ring, and some hopes, and the desire to be better. She didn’t have a father anymore, but even if she did, he suspected she’d speak for herself on that regardless. All he could do was ask that if she felt the same, maybe they could keep building more of that life together, take it in a different way now. Somehow it felt like that took more courage than facing a hail of bullets, but he had to do it. 

Seeing Javi had stumbled on the muddy bank from a cast and come up looking like some kind of muck monster, he laughed, offering him a hand to get to his feet. Wiping his own muddy hand on his pants, he looked at his watch. “We got enough fish, so we might as well head back. Get cleaned up and dressed proper, so we ain’t at the wedding looking like this.” As he headed for Buell, he called back over his shoulder, “But you better write me from Chicago, then.”

~~~~~~~~~~

**New Austin Star, March 20th, 1901**  
 _CHOLERA AND CRIMINALITY RAVAGE NEW AUSTIN_  
A plague of epic proportions has laid waste to the fair desert town of Armadillo, leaving the one proud marker of American progress in the wilderness a mere shell of its former self.

Cholera, the swift killer, has slain perhaps three in four of the town’s population, and left most of the rest fled for their lives. Alongside the sad decaying specter of Tumbleweed, left to rot due to lack of railroad access, Armadillo now stands lonesome and forlorn.

It is uncertain when the town will recover. Some say it never shall. But the spirit of New Austinians is as indomitable as granite, and in making a successful home in such a formidable and hostile environment, the people of Armadillo are not so easily shaken.

District US Marshal Leigh Johnson, called away to deal with threat of bandits out near Rathskeller Fork, returned post-haste to the stricken town. He reports the water supply is verified clean of all infection, and has sworn to continue to protect the citizens of the region and restore law and order. He struggles mightily in this task as attacks from the Del Lobo gang grow more frequent as these unwanted outlaws invade our fair territory from across the Mexican border in search of more plunder to satiate their never-ending greed. 

Sheriff Horace Palmer was unfortunately among the casualties of the cholera, and requests for aid from the east fall upon an already strained police force as Blackwater’s Chief Dunbar reports a still-extant critical shortage of lawmen following the horrific Blackwater Massacre, and Chief Lambert in St. Denis struggles under the burden of numerous vicious attacks by the notorious Van Der Linde Gang in that same year that slaughtered many of his best and brightest. 

Besides, the protection of the wilderness is not best left to city policemen, those denizens of cobblestones and electric lights, but to those who know and love our wild territory the best. Brave men of New Austin, will you let your homes fall to banditry and ruin? Will you leave the work of defending the innocent to the likes of bounty hunters and other such mercenary scavengers upon the carrion of immorality, rather than the service of courageous and morally upright men of the law? The war against criminality is at your very doorstep, the defense of America against the rising Mexican menace is necessary! The banner is yours to take up and hold high.


	23. Chuparosa I: The Lovers, The Dreamers

Cleaned up from the fishing trip, and with the fish handed over to Sister Ursula for preparation, he ended up getting dressed in Felipe’s small clinic, empty today, with the clothes he’d brought from Chuparosa. No point putting on good stuff when he’d been planning to go fishing, but for friends like Pedro and Juanita, he could certainly do better than a worn shirt and pants.

Sadie had prodded him to buy something nicer for the wedding last time they were in Escalera dropping off a bounty, saying he could justify the expense given he’d be able to use it. “Maybe not when we’re on the trail, but we’ve been getting some folk sniffing around asking about other jobs, you know. Mines wanting their take guarded, that sort of thing. It’s a good move for you to have some nicer things for meeting with the likes of them to talk about a job.”

“Sure, I ain’t never dealt with that,” he quipped. “Look at who raised me, huh? I done my share of dressing fine to go butter up businessmen.” He’d always kept at least one good set of town clothes for things like that, knowing showing up in worn and mended work clothes could mess up the whole deal. Dutch usually wanted him to be the menacing silent strongarm and not say much, while the rare occasions he and Hosea got to do a job together those last ten years, Hosea almost always dragged him into the charade by giving him a role to play.

“You say ‘businessmen’ like it’s a dirty word.”

“Well, it can be.”

“Yeah, but I ain’t asking you to sell your soul to Leviticus Cornwall, Arthur. You was capable of drawing a line between regular folk protecting what’s theirs and them robber barons in picking stagecoaches, why is this any different?”

“They do say you don’t hire a saint to catch a sinner, so I guess the smartest folk for guarding a shipment is them who know best how to rob it.”

“My sister does call you ‘Saint Bandit’,” Sadie teased. He’d rolled his eyes at that, well aware of the nickname given that Sadie hadn’t told Caroline his actual name to this point. Trying to protect him, as usual. Though he wasn’t sure _saint_ applied in any sense. 

He found himself smiling a bit at that all the same, remembering it, doing up the tie--orange, he’d done, and then a dark blue vest, remembering Hosea often wore blue and orange together. It felt like a good way to remember him. He’d bought a jacket too, a sober charcoal grey. Showing some flair but still containing the flash, Hosea would have put it. But it was so warm today that he laid the jacket aside. Giving his hair a quick comb with his fingers, he decided he’d do.

Heading to the chapel next, he took his seat next to Sadie, taking in the sight of her in a deep blue skirt and a lilac purple vest, hair shining like spun gold in the shafts of sunlight through the window. She smiled, nodding towards Pedro and Juanita up at the altar with Calderón. “They look real fine,” she murmured.

“They do.” They practically radiated their joy, those two, the happiness in them so obvious that nobody could deny it. He had to wish them well, given they’d been kind to him from the very first, some damn fool American who couldn’t speak a bit of Spanish, struggling to breathe, struggling to survive, struggling to figure everything out in a world where he’d suddenly been thrust back into a position of considering a future he’d never planned on having. TB had come to call and made that a stark reality he had to face and accept, but that had been so even before he’d ever met Thomas Downes. 

Ever since Dutch and Hosea took him in--probably all his life, were he to be honest--he’d never planned on dying an old man in his bed. As a child he’d worried about starving, or being beaten to death by someone he messed up robbing. After Hosea and Dutch, then things changed to where he’d always expected to die from a bullet or twenty, maybe a hanging if he was truly unlucky. He’d never thought to plan in earnest for a future, because there had never been one to think about. He’d put all that away after Mary and Eliza, locked up tight as could be, and accepted what felt like an inevitable fate. Be there for what family he had in the gang he loved, and be ready for the end when it came.

He’d tried to support Dutch’s dreams of retiring from the bandit life and buying a place out west, and then even his crazy delusions of Tahiti, but privately he could admit he’d never really _believed_ it, in that deep unshakable way of true faith. Trying to accept he could have that quiet life, much as he wanted it, felt impossible. 

Things could maybe be different. He saw that now. Things _had_ to be different, because he was different, and that meant still trying to figure things out, stumbling as much as he got it right. But that first feeble flicker of hope in his soul had stayed and grown, some kind of glowing light within now. Sometimes it dimmed, sometimes it blazed, but it was there. He’d made that on his own too, rather than having it be a dream that Dutch handed to him. 

_Maybe. Maybe, maybe, maybe._ He and Sadie had built something together already, after that mad dash here to Perdido, two scared and lost souls sticking together. It felt like what dreams they had fit together. Doing right by people where they could, maybe getting some land, some horses.

He hadn’t planned on it, or seriously let himself hope, but whenever he let himself dream a bit, it was of quitting the outlaw life and going honest. As much as he’d given John shit about his dreams of being a rancher, hadn’t he thought the same? All he’d wanted, like he told Calderón, was a home and a family, something stable and secure and to call his own. 

Sadie had wanted to keep her parents’ farm, then she’d had the little ranch with Jake up in Ambarino, and it was no great shakes, poor and just starting out as they’d been. But it had been theirs all the same. And there was the part of him that had to think that with the right person by her side, after how long she’d waited for Jake, even a tiny cabin up in the Grizzlies must have felt more beautiful to her than any palace. 

Some things he didn’t quite understand, traditions for the wedding, like Pedro giving Juanita a tray with gold coins, or a long string of rosary beads festooned with desert wildflowers wound around both their shoulders. Mexico still had its share of surprises, but he’d learned to listen, or ask.

Some things didn’t need explanation, though. He suspected that no matter what religion or culture, some things were the same anywhere when it came to a wedding, probably had been for as long as people had existed. Promising to share the good and bad in life together, saying _Now I’m yours, and you’re mine, come what may._

He felt Sadie’s hand slip into his as Calderón finished the wedding mass, Pedro lifting Juanita’s veil and giving her a kiss. He held on, wanting so much to hope that he felt like he could barely breathe, and that was no unfamiliar feeling here at Las Hermanas for him, but it had nothing to do with TB.

After that, another thing needing no explanation was the festivities. He went to go congratulate the happy bridegroom. “You folk sure know how to throw a party,” he said to Pedro, glancing around the courtyard, full of people. “I’m guessing this is the liveliest Las Hermanas has been.”

“They usually throw a wedding party in Chuparosa, but it made more sense. My TB, her history with the Church,” he answered. “And you know as well as me that we lungers can do with some happiness.”

Arthur glanced towards where some of the patients were sitting, too tired to join in the fun. Lupe Flores, who’d been here for six years and still kept fighting, though most days she could barely get out of bed, but her eyes shone brighter all the same today. A few of the ones he didn’t recognize, obviously newer, who’d burned a bit of their brief window of time out of bed to come see what was going on, and linger for a couple of minutes. “Can’t much argue with that. It’s real fine of you to think of that.”

“This might be a bit more subdued than most. Usually the fiesta will go at least till dawn if people let it, even after the bride and groom leave.”

“Well, I’m too damn old for raising hell all night, so it won’t be me letting you know, sorry to say.”

Pedro laughed at that. “We’ve both found there are better things in life than that.” Arthur saw how his eyes never strayed from Juanita for too long, in her white dress and veil. 

He reached out, took Pedro’s hand, giving it a firm handshake. “Best of luck to you and Juanita. You both was kind to me and Sadie both, right from the start. Can’t say I know of two folk who deserve happiness more. You both waited long enough for it.”

“ _Gracias_.” Pedro’s voice wavered for a moment, but then recovered, and he gave Arthur a quick hug, then heading back to his wife, the two of them drawn together like a pair of magnets. 

Pedro hadn’t been kidding about the dedication to a celebration. Arthur had seen that in Chuparosa at Christmas, and here it was again. Lanterns hung, flowers everywhere, the solemn austerity of a convent transformed for the night. Food, and the lack of meat kept it respectful of Lent, but there was more than enough to give everyone their fill and then some. _Well, Felipe keeps saying we need to keep the weight on._ He couldn’t blame Juanita and Pedro for being impatient enough to not even wait another week or two until after Easter, anyway. Tequila and beer flowing pretty freely, and Felipe obviously was inclined to let everyone just enjoy themselves tonight, because Arthur saw him with a beer in hand, watching the festivities with a bit of a wistful smile.

Dancing, of course, and the tight quarters in the courtyard made that a bit of a challenge sometimes, though people worked it out mostly by taking breaks and yielding the floor to others. He danced with Juanita, paying a few pesos for the privilege to the new couples’ housekeeping fund, congratulating her too. Danced with a few other women, but mostly he danced with Sadie, seeing the sparkle in her hazel eyes, her broad and unguarded smile, hearing her laugh. He’d known she was beautiful, of course, because that didn’t depend on what she wore or the like. But he wasn’t sure he’d ever seen her this happy, caught up in the bright hopes of the day like all of them were.

It felt good to relax, to live in that moment and that joy. Dance a bit and not worry about being a clumsy fool, laugh his fair share with people, and drink what he realized, around the time the newlyweds left for Chuparosa shortly after midnight to a chorus of cheers and well wishes, was a little too much given how his head was now reeling. He still hadn’t quite put back on those last few pounds of muscle he’d had from working hard day after day, and that plus desert heat and not drinking much for a year and a half now meant it got to him quicker. But it was tipsy, nothing like truly drunk, and he wasn’t alone in that, given everyone was letting their hair down when it came to the alcohol. So it felt harmless enough. Just a way for everyone here to enjoy things and let go a little more easily, everything gone a bit more mellow and wonderful by it. 

But time to take a break and sober up a bit, probably, even though he and Sadie would stay the night. It would mean a pallet or a cot, alongside with other Chuparosa guests, but that wouldn’t be an issue. He nodded to Sadie as they wove their way through all the people and out of the courtyard. “Care for a stroll, get some air?” Maybe he noticed it less given the drinks, but eventually the realization of how crowded the courtyard was caught up with him, and right now he wanted nothing more than a few moments of peace and quiet with her.

She laughed, catching his arm with one hand, slapping him lightly on the shoulder with the other. “That sounds real fine right about now.”

So they walked a bit, and he ventured, “It was a nice wedding.” 

“Sure was.” She gave him a bit of a sweetly lopsided grin. “You gonna draw something from all this in that journal of yours?”

“Might do, yeah.” 

“Arthur the artist. Anyone ever call you ‘Art’, or that too on the nose? Artsy Art.”

“Nope. Why, you wanna call me that?” People didn’t give him nicknames like that. Too cute, when Dutch had been looking for ruthless, intimidating, relentless. 

“Ain’t sure. Why, you like it if I did?” She chuckled to herself.

 _Don’t think there’s much you could do that I wouldn’t like._ He almost blurted that out. “Maybe? I don’t know.”

She patted his arm then. “Ah, it’s fine, honey. I know you ain’t never had much space for figuring out the things you want. All right to do that now, you know?”

 _You. I want you. I know that._ That tight feeling was back in his chest, longing and hope and fear all at once. “Well, what did folk call you?”

“Not much you can do to shorten ‘Sadie’.”

He thought that one over. “What, ‘Sad’? ‘Saddie’? I seen you sad, at Horseshoe. The Hollow too, really. It’s...it’s real good to see you smile. I want you to be happy.” _Maybe I could make you happy. I want that more than anything._ But all the words were there, the ones he’d started thinking about that afternoon, trying to arrange and polish what it was he wanted to say so when he talked to her tomorrow it wouldn’t be some Godawful clumsy mess. The words were there but his head was half in a muddle, dizzy with both drinks and her, and he couldn’t seize them. “Could switch letters around a bit. Sadie...Daisy. Daisy?”

She laughed at that. “So long as you ain’t mistaking me for your other woman named Daisy.”

“Couldn’t never do that. No mistaking you.” There couldn’t be anyone else like her in the whole wide world. “Don’t have another gal neither, and you know that. But you’re the musician, you must have heard that song.”

“What you mean?”

“That song, a few years back. That music hall one. It was _everywhere_ , just about.” He tried to think of any of the lyrics, and it came to him, snapping his fingers. Humming a line or two, he sang what he remembered of the chorus. “Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do, I’m half crazy, all for the love of you.” Something about bicycles in there too, right?

His brain was a bastard because he realized only too late what that could sound like, and especially with how he’d turned to her, looking at her. He almost instinctively tried to laugh it off, move on to something else, treat it as just a silly little music hall song he only half-remembered. But something in him stubbornly held, made him wait. See what she would do with that, whether she _wanted_ to take it as a meaningless bit of music or not. Though even as he was doing so, something within him was silently begging to Sadie or God or anyone that was listening, _Please?_

It was hard to say what exactly changed in her, but even hazy as things were, he felt like he could sense some shift between them, some charge. Somehow, she knew, and part of him wanted to run like hell. She looked right back at him, brows knit for a moment, and then they eased. Then she reached up, that strong hand of her catching behind his neck, tugging him down a bit, and she kissed him, hard and decisive, nothing shy about it.

He’d been thrown or fallen from his share of horses, fallen from trains and stagecoaches, knocked on his ass by dynamite. None of that left him nearly so dazed as this, but he recovered with what he felt was admirable quickness, kissing her back, wanting nothing more than here, this moment, her, and for it to last the rest of his life.

Somehow he’d turned them, ended up pressing her up against the stable wall, and it kept going between them, all raw and greedy and fierce. One hand braced alongside her against the wall, the other cradling the back of her head, and he didn’t have a hand free anyway but he wanted to touch her so damn much but he shouldn’t, and why he shouldn’t he wasn’t certain since she had one hand fisted in his vest and the other with her fingers splayed out in his hair, one leg hooked around his, pulling him in closer and if she got any closer than that, shifted her hips at all, she was going to be _very_ aware he was enjoying the hell out of this. He wasn’t sure whether it was her shaking or him or both that he felt, and it was too much to take in and feel, starving so long for this, but if it somehow killed him right in that moment he thought he’d die happy as anything. 

_Oh Jesus she does love me, how the hell did that even happen?_ Though quickly enough some cold slivers of reality started working their way in. What happened now? Shove up her skirt, unbutton his pants, and take her right there up against a wall, like he’d seen men do with painted ladies when he was a kid? Go into the stables and snuggle down in a haystack like he had with Mary when he was twenty-one, and do it there? Maybe, but he’d dreamed of it being something fine between them, if it was ever going to happen. Having the chance to be gentle and taking their time, not something hasty, not something furtive. Besides, he’d been drinking too much, like he had with Eliza too, and that sounded a dark note of warning in his mind. 

Was this even real? Or did this end up nine months from now with him an accidental father to another kid with a woman who’d only wanted him because of the whiskey? Hadn’t he learned anything at all from that? It was why he’d denied himself all of this since then. He wasn’t going to make that mistake again, and hurt a good woman because he made for a stupid drunk.

Though Sadie wasn’t some stranger he’d just met. He knew her, she knew him. He loved her, and she...no, she hadn’t said anything about love. Hadn’t said anything at all, only kissed him. Maybe that said enough. _So she’s always gonna love Jake, but seems you’ll do to scratch the itch._

He’d told himself he’d be fine with her wanting him in her bed on whatever terms. The simple fact of her being here and wanting him, seeing something in him worth the bother, should be enough.

Wasn’t it?

It wasn’t. Having her body, having her hands on him, but insisting they were only friends and he’d never be someone she could love, he’d just end up feeling even more alone. Maybe even worse than he’d felt as a teenager in those couple of brothels Dutch had shoved him into, and there had been some curiosity, yes, but mostly he'd been too scared to disappoint his mentor and not do what was expected of him. Because unlike the awkwardness of two strangers pretending their way through meaningless physical pleasure, Sadie would be so tantalisingly close to everything he wanted, that it’d break his heart even more. He couldn’t pretend his way through that. He could be a friend, or he could be a husband, but he couldn’t stay in this strange in-between place they’d found themselves, let alone actually add sex into the picture and make it even more muddled. He needed to be one thing or the other, not two people at once.

His heart felt caught in his throat as he broke off the kiss, fighting for both air and words. “This ain’t--” He didn’t want this to be how things either began or retreated between them, in a half-drunken mess. “Look, we should get some sleep. We both drunk too much, and…”

She stared up at him, eyes suddenly burning fiercely. “I ain’t Eliza, Arthur,” she said between her teeth. “Don’t you treat me like a woman you didn’t even know, and you just got drunk enough to screw me and pretend I'm someone else. Ain’t you used her as an excuse for long enough?” 

Like a punch he hadn’t seen coming, that one hurt like hell, and the anger flared up to cover the pain. “Sure, I know how that goes, don't I? That what you're about here, getting drunk enough so you can pretend I’m Jake while I’m busy fucking you in a hayloft?” He gestured towards the stables. “This really how you want that to go?”

Right behind the edges of the temper, though, the panic and despair moved in with a vengeance. Here he was wanting too much, like he had a right to any of it, no matter what Calderón said. She saw the best in things, that was all. Why the hell should he try to demand that Sadie had to hold him up as equal to Jake for him to bother? He was what he was, something worn and rough and ragged, dirty with all the years and all the sins, and he’d had no business hoping. He'd been one hell of a thief, but the most worthwhile things couldn't be taken or stolen. This was one of them. All he could do was ask, but no reason she should want to give him her heart if she wanted him.

Besides, how could he say “no”, given what he owed her? If some comfort was all she wanted, did he really need to be a bastard and tell her he was too good for that? But he’d owed Dutch too, given him everything out of that anxious sense of debt, and look how that turned out. He couldn’t do that again either.

Caught between Scylla and Charybdis again. It was all too much, and he couldn’t make sense of it. So all he could think to do was get the hell out of there before he made it worse, or did something truly pathetic like break down and start rambling and begging her to let him stay. “Just--do what you want, Sadie. You should be happy. But I can’t…not right now...” He shook his head, unable to say more than that. 

He could have Buell saddled and be out of here in a few minutes, and yes, he was tipsy, but he could make it home to Chuparosa if he focused and there were no Del Lobos roaming the desert tonight. All he needed was to hold it together another five minutes or so.

But as he headed into the stable, hearing Buell’s soft trumpeting greeting, she wasn’t done with him. “Arthur!”

Like a good dog, he still paid attention when summoned. “What?” he asked wearily, resigned now. “It’s fine, it’s fine, I’ll have my stuff cleared out of the house later today. Just let me get sober first, all right?”

“Oh God,” she said, more to herself than him. “Jesus Christ, what a mess we've made.” She moved closer. “You don’t have to go. I don’t--I don’t want you to go, all right?”

He didn’t want to go either, but he absolutely couldn’t make heads nor tails of this otherwise. “Then what in hell do you want?”

She stepped closer, hesitating then as if he were a horse than might spook and run. “You’re right. We ain’t thinking straight, or talking straight, and...look, I don’t want you doing nothing only cause you think I want it.”

He couldn’t help but turn back towards her, not quite daring to hope. “That’s the trouble. I do want it. Want you. More than anything. But what you’re wanting, and what I’m wanting--” He shook his head. “Gotta be the same, don’t it?”

“It does.” She stepped in again, putting a hand on his arm, holding on, but gently. “So let’s sleep it off. Then we’ll figure it out. But don’t run off. Please. Can’t fix or figure out nothing if you ain’t here to do it.”

He’d always been a man on the run, literally and figuratively. Learned that the best way to handle things was to put as many miles between him and it as possible, lay low, and eventually it would go away. But they’d seen differently after Blackwater. Problems could chase after people, and absolutely refuse to go away. Sometimes they had to be faced down. If he ran, he’d better accept that the two of them were absolutely done. So maybe this time he had to take the chance of standing his ground and facing it. He’d been ready to ask her tomorrow already, hadn’t he? She’d said she didn’t want him to go. But it was all confused right now, too many shades of grey to the whole thing, and he really needed his head clear to try to wrap around any of it. “All right. I ain’t running.”

It scared the shit out of him but he’d accept that, and so he followed her up to the roof, finding a cot, and falling asleep up there quicker than he expected. Been a while now since he’d slept up on this roof, and he’d changed from that man he’d been four months ago, but he wasn’t sure if that was enough.

Then he was back far away from the desert, among trees and green summer grass and a clear stream, bluffs in the distance. Near Horseshoe Overlook, if he judged correctly. Sitting there on a rock, watching that same buck deer that liked to show up in his dreams calmly take a drink at the stream, eye him for a long minute, and then wander off, without fear or wariness. The right animal spirit for him, Rains Fall had called it. Trying to be the things the Wapiti said that deer stood for, and maybe he’d done a decent job of it that it kept on showing up rather than disappearing forever. 

But watching the buck amble off, vanishing into the trees, peaceful as it was, gave no answer to anything within him right now. So he tried to at least enjoy the tranquil beauty of the place, hoping maybe that would help settle his mind and heart. “That’s about the most I’ve ever seen you sit still. Guess you finally learned some patience, Arthur.”

Hearing the voice, he turned, startled, and saw the familiar figure there. He’d lost the tired stoop of illness, some of the lines from his face, eyes brighter. Looked more like the man Arthur remembered from ten years ago or so. “Hosea.”

His old friend, his other father, settled himself down on that rock too beside Arthur. “So much better when your knees ain’t giving you shit every day,” he said with a low chuckle. 

“You here for me?”

“I seem to be lacking my fishing pole, so that’s my guess.” Hosea waved a hand. “No, no, forget the joke. Sure, that’s why I’m here.”

He’d thought a lot about how he wished Hosea was there, how many things he wished he could ask, but all of those words caught up in a knot inside him suddenly. “Guess I went and screwed it up again.”

“You had a few sharp words with a woman and that’s it, you’re gonna think that’s the end of everything?” Hosea laughed, shaking his head. “Bessie and me used to have the most magnificent rows. That woman in a temper was a sight. Though we tried to not fight around you, or John. Guess we figured you’d seen enough hard things.”

“Didn’t need to worry. Saw plenty of my folks fighting when I was real little. And me and John wasn’t exactly naive, given Dutch always was fighting with his women when he was just about done with them,” Arthur answered dryly. 

“I suppose. We both overlooked a lot in him. Made a lot of excuses. Couldn’t believe in him otherwise.”

“You didn’t believe, at the end. You was careful in how you said it, but feels like you was trying to get us all to leave.” 

“I was. And I wish you and John had both run. But I knew you wouldn’t. You thought you had nowhere else to go. So then I hoped you’d look after our family after I was gone, get those who had a future out. You did that, sure enough. But I didn’t want you to try to become me, right down to shouting matches with Dutch and dying of lung disease.” Hosea nudged Arthur’s shoulder with his. “Didn’t get either of us in the end, though, did it?”

“Suppose it didn’t. What exactly was you hoping for me, anyway, imagining if I'd leave?”

“That you’d take Mrs. Adler and get the hell out of there.”

“Sadie?”

“There another Mrs. Adler that you’re crazy about?”

“It weren’t like that with us.”

“No, neither of you was up to it then, and I never did expect you’d have the time to get there. Figured none of us would see the end of the year, the way things was going. But I’d see you two all the same. Sitting together. Talking. All caught up in each other. Ain’t never seen you that happy and comfortable around a woman in your life.”

“She’s a real fine woman. The best.” 

“She is at that. Trust me, if she cared enough to do all that to keep you alive, and she’s stayed this long, it’s not cause she’s indifferent.” 

“I know she ain’t, just not sure what kind of love exactly she’s got towards me.” He looked out at the stream, seeing a salmon leap there. “That why you’re here? Advice on wooing and romance? Suppose it’s far finer than what Dutch would have told me.”

“I wasn’t much of a father to you boys.”

“You was sure as shit better than Dutch. I see that now. You tried. You cared. Hell, it was you taught us both to read, to write. Trying to get us to think. I...” He sighed, looking down at his hands. “Now I’m thinking you loved us all along, the way it should have been, and I was too damn dumb to see it.”

“Dutch was willing to say it. I--my pa never said more than about a dozen words to me, but I worshipped him. Lived for seeing him again, hoping for that fine and sunny day where he’d say he loved me, that he was...he was proud of me. Guess I never learned from that.”

Was that the reality of fatherhood, failing the children a father was supposed to love and protect? “You and me wasn’t exactly the talking type.”

“Should have been. I tried to love you boys without ever having to say it. I should have said it.” Hosea put an arm around his shoulders. “When we found you, I wasn’t that much beyond my degenerate bastard years myself. But Bessie needed to be a mother. Truly needed it. I wasn’t sure I wanted to be a father, but, well,” he shrugged awkwardly, “you seemed like such a talented little crook Dutch and me could use, and I liked your guts. But you were so scared. Wild. Angry. I didn’t expect much from you, I’ll be honest. For a con man, I was a poor judge of folk sometimes.”

“I didn’t come with much to recommend me.” He wouldn’t fool himself on that. Nobody wanted a pissed-off, hard-nosed fourteen-year-old pickpocket who couldn’t read or write. He’d been well aware of that fact. “But you wanted me enough to take me on. You kept me alive. Let me be better than I was. I was some dumb animal that’d have starved or been shot or hanged eventually. Maybe you wasn’t the best family, but it was better than I had.”

“That ain’t saying much. You surprised me, is all I’m saying. How smart you actually were. How much you worried about other people. There was so much goodness in you that never could get rooted out. It was Bessie and you who really taught me what love was, you know that? That I was worth loving.”

He felt that lump in his throat. “Yeah?”

“Honest. I know John was Dutch’s favorite, but gotta admit you were mine. I saw a lot of myself in you. Maybe too much. Maybe that was why I never said things I should. Cowardly of me, I’m afraid, but, well, seeing things from the other side gives you some perspective.”

“So you made it to heaven, then?”

“So it seems. Or whatever place it is.” Hosea gave him an almost boyish grin. “They do say Jesus died with a thief crucified on either side, and he promised one of them they’d be together in paradise. So even our savior loves a penitent sinner. So we’re keeping an eye on them as came here, Bessie and me.”

“Sean still won’t shut up?”

“Never.”

He couldn’t help but laugh at that. “Karen?”

“Ain’t seen her yet. Can’t tell you where she is.”

“‘Can’t’ as in you don’t know, or ‘can’t’ as in you ain’t allowed?” It would make things a hell of a lot easier as to finding out whether Karen was OK or not if he knew where she was. Tilly and Mary-Beth and Pearson and all the rest, he’d trust they could look after themselves now that they’d run and gotten free. It was Karen, drunk and lost, who he still worried about the most. 

“Bright boy, asking the right questions. Can’t tell you that either. Some things you’ve got to find out for yourself.”

“Well, there’s a typically cryptic Hosea Matthews answer.” Hosea had always loved those, leaving people puzzling them over to find out whether they’d gotten the answer they wanted, or mocked, or whatever.

“Ah, there’s that smart-mouthed little shit again that I know and love. You never did outgrow the sarcasm. Just turned it into wit, didn’t you? When you wasn’t too busy playing big and dumb.”

“Love?” He questioned it, looking over at Hosea.

“Love. Should have said it. Guess there was things I was afraid of too.”

“Know that feeling.”

“Don’t ask me whether Sadie Adler wants to marry you, cause that you’re going to have to take a risk on that yourself. Like you said, being a man means accepting your destiny and choices are your own, right?”

“You really here telling me all this, or am I just dreaming it cause I need it?” 

“It’s a con man’s gift telling people what they need to hear and making them believe, isn’t it?” Hosea’s wink and grin faded, and he gave a sober nod. “Ask her about Jesus and the thieves, though. You never had much time for religious types before that nun of yours, and unless I’m mistaken and you stole one behind my back, you ain’t never read a Bible neither to know it.”

“Sure.” He looked over at Hosea. “You talked at all to Eliza, or seen Isaac, then?”

“Seen them, sure. You was wrong when you told me he looked nothing like you. Got her coloring, but he looks a fair bit like you.” 

Something about that seemed strange, Hosea knowing that about a four-year-old kid, but he couldn’t tease it out exactly. The whole thing went far beyond whatever the hell he was supposed to know. So they were all right. Though he realized it didn’t tell him what he’d really hoped to know--whether they forgave him or not for how he’d failed them. But it was too easy an absolution, wasn’t it? Even if they did, the scar was there all the same, the years of self-recrimination and guilt and sorrow. “Another of them non-answers I gotta find out myself? I suppose you don’t know nothing neither about some odd creepy fella in black, has a top hat, and a mustache.”

“Aside from Trelawney? Gotta leave you some fun, don’t I?”

“Of course. Send me chasing all over the place looking like a damn fool on some treasure hunt for the answers while you laugh your ass off.”

“Ain’t like that. It gonna mean anything to you if I hand it all over?”

He had to admit defeat on that one. “Probably not.”

Hosea turned, put a hand on Arthur’s shoulder, waiting until Arthur looked up and met his eyes. “Look. You need to hear it for once in your life. You fought hard for your own path. You’ve changed your life. I came back in part because Bessie and me realized we never should have left you. But I also gave up on going straight when things got tough, and so that condemned you and Bessie both to living that life alongside me. You’re tougher than I was, gentler too, though. And I hope you’ll be wiser. I love you, and I’m proud of you, son. The man you’ve become.”

He felt the burn of tears at the back of his eyes. It felt like all he’d ever wanted was to hear something like that. “I miss you, you know that? Wish I could go fishing now. Or hunting. I expect you had more to teach me.”

“Some, but you learned the best of it. The things that really mattered, for all they were the ones I never told you.” He understood what Hosea meant by that, and it wasn’t about fishing by any means. What he knew about being a man, about how to treat people, about maybe being a husband, seemed like he'd learned it from Hosea. 

“For having a lousy daddy yourself, you found your way. Made a pretty damn good father to us all just the same.”

Hosea looked a little choked up himself at that. Then he recovered, patting Arthur on the back. “Just tell what kids you have that you love them. That you're proud of them. And you’ll see us again someday. Just don’t be in such a damn hurry as you was.”

He could sense things drawing to an end here. “So any more words of advice?”

“You got the chance to live for love yourself now. To be happy. Have the things you want. I taught you to play poker, didn’t I? Love’s a gamble too. You can’t win if you don’t play. So put your damn chips on the table for once, son, and play. You got dealt a harder hand in life than most, but it ain’t all in the cards, it's in how you work the table. And I trust you’ll play your hand better than I ever did.”

He couldn’t help but smile at that, because turning proposing marriage into a high stakes poker metaphor was so quintessentially Hosea that it soothed and hurt all at once. “Go all in and hope that queen of hearts shows up, is that it?”

“Just about.” He’d sensed it right because then Hosea got to his feet. “Gotta be getting back. Anything you want to tell anyone?”

“No, I'll keep it for when I see them. Just tell them I said 'hello'. Though if you chance to see my momma, tell her I want to name a girl ‘Beatrice’ for her.”

Hosea let out a long laugh at that, eyes shining with affectionate humor, giving Arthur one last clap on the shoulder, hand lingering as if he even if he had to, he didn’t want to let go. “Making plans already? Found your guts again. Good.”

“If it’s a boy, you know I’d suggest ‘Hosea’.”

That earned him an eyeroll and a low whistle. “Dear God, Arthur, don’t ever do that to a child you’re supposed to love. I always hated my name.”

Fine, fair enough, though there had to be some way to honor a man who’d truly been his father in the ways that counted. He thought about it for a moment. “Matthew, then?” Hosea nodded and smiled at that, pleasure at the idea obvious in that bright grin. Then he turned to go, waving a hand in farewell. Arthur watched him walk off, and as he moved into the same trees the buck had a while back, just as Hosea vanished, he swore he saw a red fox there too. 

He would have headed there himself but he had the odd sense it was a place he wasn’t meant to go just yet. But maybe someday. So he sat and watched the peaceful stream, trying to clear his mind, get things in order. He’d wake up at whatever point, but until then, might as well do his best to not be afraid, to think about what he needed to say. Either way, they’d have to talk, and it was going to provide some answers. He could at least look at it with more hope than before, though.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter to Sadie from Arthur, left beside her at Las Hermanas**  
Sadie,  
I swear I ain’t running. I know it may look like it when you wake up and don’t find me there so I wanted to write this. Feels like using a lot of ink to say ~~a bunch of bullshit~~ not much when there is a lot we need to say, and maybe I ain’t explaining much with this letter. Certainly ain’t saying the important things. I have always been a man who puts things better when written than spoken aloud. But some things you just can’t put to paper. They need to be said. So I guess that’s where this is going. Me saying not much and rambling.

Thing is I woke up, and found that the ragged end of a wedding fiesta and some groaning bleary eyed drunks at ten in the morning don’t do much for sober reflection (and I do mean it in both senses of the word). And there is a lot I want to make sure I know how to say clear enough. Plus I imagine you are going to wake up with a headache too so it don’t hurt to take a bit of time to let that clear out before jumping into all of it.

So I aim to head out to Ojo del Diablo and do my thinking there. If you want you can find me there. Otherwise I will be back in Chuparosa by dinner at the latest and we can talk then.

Arthur

PS I’m serious. If I ain’t back by then don’t assume I lied and scurried off. ~~I am bringing my guns but if you don’t see me then chances are that damn jaguar or a Del Lobo got lucky and I’m probably dead in which case I may regret not saying some things in this letter. But we can’t have it both ways I guess so~~ Trust me when I say I don’t take things between us lightly enough to abandon you like that. ~~Not to mention you could probably track me down and kill me just fine.~~

Sorry for the scribbles. Seems this letter is a Goddamn mess ~~and so am I~~.


	24. Chuparosa I: A Bright Future Imagined I

Sadie woke with a groan, feeling the slight dull throb in her head, and her hand bumped something. Opening her eyes, she saw the folded paper there, left right by her outstretched right hand. Grabbing it, she forced herself to sit upright, feet over the edge of the cot, rubbing her eyes with her left hand. 

_You have gotta be Goddamn kidding me. I swear, if that man wrote some note saying he’s sorry for offending me and he’s running off to Montana or Bolivia in shame, I’m gonna hunt him down and kill him myself._

Unfolding the paper, seeing the beautiful handwriting alongside the hastily crossed out words, most of them scribbled over thickly, she read it. Read it again, trying to take it in given her brain still waking up as was, and the fading ache in there too. 

She sighed, folded the paper back up, rubbing her temples. All right. So he hadn’t run off. Not exactly, anyway. He’d retreated to go panic or think or both, but he’d made it awkwardly and anxiously clear he wasn’t abandoning that conversation they’d started last night. That was something.

Not much of a conversation, though. She couldn’t help an awkward groan. She’d been tipsy, all right, but she remembered most of it clearly enough. How good the evening felt, the dancing and drinking and laughter. Walking with him, talking, teasing each other, the giddy flare of hope in her, then him singing that silly little music hall song to her. She’d thought he’d meant something by it, that it was far more than a song, and from how he’d reacted to her kiss, he did. There was no uncertainty there--he’d wanted her every bit as much as she’d wanted him, and if she could have, God, she might have had him right there up against that wall because it had felt so good, lost in that moment and the joy of finding he wanted this too.

So that answered one question. He clearly wanted something from her in addition to being her friend. She needn’t worry that she’d shoved him into that. No man could kiss like that, all enthusiasm and a deep, ravenous hunger released, and be half-hearted about the notion. 

But then he’d drawn back, started pulling away, and the awkwardness returned in a rush. She’d been so caught up in it she’d thought it was him running scared, and she couldn’t bear it. He couldn’t offer her that hope, and then slam the door in her face, because it hurt too much. To have that and have it yanked away, to be left out in the cold feeling like she wasn’t enough to get through, that his protective armor of guilt still meant more to him. Said things, yelled things, and even through the haze of too much tequila, some of those words stayed imprinted on her.

He thought she wanted him only as a poor substitute, and she’d gotten drunk enough to pretend. Shit. He did know what that was like, didn’t he? And she’d flung it at him, intending it to hurt.

“You are one hell of a fool, Sadie Griffith,” she muttered, smoothing down her skirt, rumpled from how she’d collapsed on that cot. 

Jesus. Of course he’d shied away. From what he’d told her, the last two times he’d let himself touch a woman at all, he’d been drinking. Kissing Abigail from sheer loneliness. The night he spent with Eliza, both of them blind drunk, conceiving a son and setting their lives on a path that would end with her dead and him locking up so much of himself tighter than any bank vault. It made sense that he’d draw back, and oblivious in her own fog of alcohol and emotion, she’d chewed him out for it.

But she wasn’t entirely wrong either. She couldn’t give way to Eliza’s ghost all her life either. The man had to able to admit to wanting things and being able to accept having them, because she couldn’t fight his guilt for years and years either. That was its own kind of dragging him into this too, and she couldn’t have him there in spite of himself. 

Stupid as they’d been last night, it had opened the door all the same. He’d left her a choice. Follow him to Ojo del Diablo, or head home. She could go to him, or wait for him to come to her. Would it be better to give him all the time he needed, and wait? But then she had the thought that badly as he thought of himself, the fact of her making it a point to come to him would say some things clearly. He’d see that this was important, that he was important, and she didn’t want to wait until dinner to talk about it and figure it out. Wouldn’t make him come to her, slinking in like a chastised dog. They’d both messed up on this one. Besides, she’d seen with Jake that settling things quickly was usually the better course, and the braver one. So she’d go, and tell him what it was that she wanted, and see what he made of that. Either way, she’d know now for sure. 

Getting to her feet, she headed inside and downstairs. Drinking a hell of a lot of clean water and eating some leftover tortillas and oranges, her headache eased. Arthur hadn’t been wrong. One o’clock now and she could see people sleeping it off in the courtyard still, and some awake, squinting bleary-eyed in the sunlight. It would be one hell of a clean up job for the nuns, but they loved Juanita as one of their own, remembered Pedro fondly, so they’d be happy to have given them such a grand send-off to start their life together.

She thought about the newlyweds waking up in Pedro’s house in Chuparosa, and couldn’t help a slight smile. Hoped that Juanita had a fine, sweet night in the arms of a man she loved, learning the joy of it all. She’d have to drop in at some point, maybe bring them something to eat, but she’d give that a few days and nights that were all full of the wonder of discovering each other. 

She undressed in Felipe’s clinic where she’d left her things, carefully folding up the good clothes, dressing in her usual work shirt and pants. Tried to fix her hair from where it had become a messy explosion mostly pulled out of its chignon, like a snarled haystack, pulling it back into a braid. 

That done, she walked out towards the stables, avoiding glancing at where she’d kissed him last night, and headed for Bob in his stall. Getting him saddled and ready to go, she rode out from the convent gates, and turned towards Ojo del Diablo. 

He wasn’t wrong on another point. Trying to get her thoughts in order was important too, and she had some time along the way. Though she couldn’t help but think there was something a little dramatic in the man retreating off that long a ride just for some space to think things over. Jake wouldn’t have done it that way. He’d have grumbled and complained, maybe yelled a bit, but he’d have just gone and had done with it, fought it out and moved on. 

She was so used to that. She hadn’t had to deal with a man who tried to vanish like smoke. It hadn’t been that much of a fight besides. Stinging words, but hell, she and Arthur had been far sharper than that after that balloon crashed in yelling at each other about Colm’s arrest, her hunting O’Driscolls, and rescuing John.

But that argument back then had been about plans. Though she still hated using that word after Dutch had bleated it so much. Last night had been about them, pressing on still painfully tender spots. She hadn’t expected him to try to flee like a startled deer, to the point of assuming, all resigned and crushed, he would need to pack his things and leave. She couldn’t easily figure out that reaction. It wasn’t normal. 

That was the trouble. It was so easy with Arthur most of the time. They’d moved comfortably into this, and most of the time things were wonderful. Then something would come along and tilt the axis of things, and then the way he’d act, he made no Goddamn sense to her.

She hadn’t realized what was dawning on her now. She’d been so lucky. She’d grown up alongside Jake. Known him like the back of her hand long before they ever thought of each other as lovers, and they’d grown up the same way. A challenging life, scraping out an existence near Tumbleweed, but a good one all the same because they’d always been loved and cherished. She’d never really had to figure Jake out, because she already knew. It was just _there_ , them understanding and predicting each other, easy and natural as breathing.

It couldn’t be like that with Arthur. He’d grown up in hell, been through things she could only imagine. A mother gone before he barely remembered her. A father who beat the shit out of him and put him to work stealing. Fighting to survive on the streets for years. Being taken in by a silver-tongued bastard who called him a son but trained and treated him as a weapon.

He’d learned to take his lectures and rebukes from Dutch silently, and to throw his weight around to keep the other boys in line as was expected. He’d learned to beat the hell out of people, and how to kill. But she’d seen how even at the end, he challenged Dutch still with that air of politeness. That was all he had: offering deference or asserting authority.

 _You never learned how to really fight with someone equal to you, did you?_ Shit. No wonder he’d panicked and assumed he’d made some irredeemable error, tried to run away from it. It didn’t fit into the system he knew.

That was the reality she saw openly now, and would have to accept. Being with Arthur wasn’t going to be nearly so easy as it had been with Jake. She’d have to work harder to figure him out, to try to help him fix some of those things, or else they were both pretty much doomed. 

As she got to Ojo del Diablo, she didn’t see him there initially. Searching around, she had to fear for a moment he had run off, despite his insisting he wasn’t. Or maybe gotten killed somehow. But then she had the thought to pull her binoculars, scanning the arch itself. She saw Buell’s pale gold coat first, from where Arthur had ridden up the slope to the mesa, and there he was, near where the rock arch started its course over the road below.

Was he worth it? He had his problems, his scars. But she’d watched who he’d grown into in all the time she’d known him, how hard he’d worked to become that man. If he wasn’t worth it, who the hell was? Besides, she’d made those vows once in her life already. They weren’t only about being there for each other in the good times.

She looked down at her left hand, at the ring she’d almost taken off yesterday out with Sarah. She’d worn that thin gold band now for four and a half years, ever since the day Jake slipped it on her finger in Blackwater. Two years and eight months. It felt strange now, a curious ache within, to realize that no matter what came with Arthur today and beyond, next February Jake would be gone for longer than she’d been married to him.

She pulled the ring off, instinctively holding it tight in her right hand, feeling a sense of loss and freedom all at once. Glanced at that unfamiliar indentation on her finger, the pale line of skin. That would fade. But Jake wouldn’t. She’d known him thirty-one years before he was taken from her, loved him in various ways for all of that, would love him in some way for the rest of her life. Jacob George Adler and the love she’d had for him, the love she’d gotten from him, would never truly leave her. 

She glanced up into the bright blue sky. “Thank you,” she told Jake softly. Then she tucked the ring away in her pocket, not quite sure what to do with it just yet, and nudged Bob back into a trot, urging him towards the slope up to the arch. 

He’d seen her coming from a long way off, so by the time she picked her way up to where he’d perched himself, he was waiting, on his feet, and she could see the tension in the lines of his stance.

Dismounting, she went over to him. “Nice view from up here,” she said, nodding out to the open air. It truly was, easy to see for miles around, all the way across the San Luis to America. She thought she could almost see Tumbleweed, far in the distance. They’d been able to see Ojo del Diablo from across the river. “We called this thing ‘Rainbow Arch’, across the river.”

“Prettier name than ‘Eye of the Devil’ for sure,” he answered her. “Though a thing can be both. We’re all good and bad both, I suppose.” She looked up at him, the brim of his hat shading his face, hiding his eyes from her. But then he glanced up, looking at her. Calmer now, his shoulders easing, and he gave a little nod, though she suspected it mostly was towards himself, something he was thinking. “Came up here to think a few times. It’s quiet, and well, I always supposed that hot air balloon was about as close to heaven as a thief and a killer would get, but this would do.”

“You’re wrong on that one. Ain’t just me saying so. There was a thief who got executed beside Jesus. Said he deserved it, but asks to be remembered at least. Jesus tells him that they’ll be together in heaven that same day.”

He looked at her, a slight smile suddenly on his lips. “That so? Hosea said that, but wasn’t sure I believed him.”

“Ask Calderón if you don’t believe me.”

“No, I do.” He glanced aside, out over the vista of Perdido. “Do you know, that balloon ride was some crazy thing. Scared as hell for half of it, I was, but--my God, it was beautiful. That whole day was something else. That was the day I found out I had TB. Fell off Zenobia’s back in St. Denis from the coughing. Some fella picked me up, got me to the doctor.”

He’d been a bit late for their meeting that morning. Now she knew why. Something hurt inside to imagine it, and how he’d somehow managed to carry on despite that devastation. “Arthur…” 

“Wandered around a few minutes, feeling sorry for myself, and then I realized I was late. Tried to pull myself together, and then I went to Doyle’s to meet you.” 

“You didn’t look good when you made it to Lakay. But I thought maybe you’d got something down on Guarma. Malaria or yellow fever or whatever.” All of them who’d ended up on that boat looked exhausted, but Arthur was by far the worst. “I figured it out later from the coughing.” It became hard to hide, and TB was distinctive enough for those who bothered to look.

“Always knew you was smart.”

“I’m sorry. That I pushed you into going into that balloon that day.” She’d been so driven, thinking only about getting John out, seeing that Dutch wasn’t going to do the first damn thing about it, and knowing Arthur was the only one she could rely upon. She hadn’t known exactly how bad off he was, but she’d pushed him all the same.

He held a hand up. “No. Don’t be. I hadn’t had that, I’d have probably wandered back to camp, felt sorry for myself. Maybe never come out of it. You was there telling me how it was we could try to get John back. This widow woman who’d been with us only a few months, and you’d taken care of the gang, and you was gonna stick your neck out for us, when Dutch didn’t give a damn. You wasn’t out to save John cause he was good with a gun, or fear he’d talk. Abigail and Jack needed him, and that was enough. It’s you that showed me the way forward. Fighting for folk to let them have something better. And I needed that right then. Like a light in the dark, it was. Maybe I was gonna die, but I could do something worthwhile before that. I could be more than Dutch’s best and loyal boy. You showed me that.” 

“Oh, Goddammit, Arthur.” Impossible man. She’d come up here, and in a few words, he’d pretty much reduced her to tears. “I ain’t no angel.”

“No, but you’re one hell of a woman, and that’s a better thing.”

“You got yourself to thank for some of that.”

“What you mean?”

“I thought about killing myself first.” She knew he’d overheard her telling Abigail that. “Then I wasn’t thinking about nothing but killing them. Killing most anyone I had half an excuse to kill, really. Hell, you was barely out of bed after escaping them O’Driscolls, and I was snipping at you for not getting Colm, rather than asking how you was. I--didn’t want to think about things that maybe gone done to you. It reminded me of too much. Wanted to just keep killing cause I thought somehow I could forget, kill till the anger was gone from me. Like a firebottle. Could have hurt anyone around me. None of them knew what to do with me after we fought for Shady Belle. They thought I was a monster, or a freak, or both. You seen what I was like even before that, and you still kept talking to me like I was...was somebody. Like a person. If I ain’t had that, if I’d gone totally to hell, I wouldn’t have been able to do them things after you boys disappeared. You kept the best of me alive when I thought it was all gone.” 

“We done all right in the end for two ghosts, huh?” he said, giving her a more genuine smile. 

“Yeah. But I’m thinking you and me, we’re more people than ghosts now.” She couldn’t help it, reaching up, pulling her own hat off, setting it down beside her, then doing the same to him. Wanting to see his face, his eyes, and needing it. Touching his face, hand cupping his cheek gently for a moment, stubble rasping gently against her hand. More than she’d usually dared in touching him, but after last night, she had to think it was no imposition. He leaned into her touch ever so slightly, and she saw how his gaze dropped shyly for a moment, then lifted again. She’d start off. Maybe he didn’t know how, maybe he did, but she had something to say anyway. “Last night. Maybe we was tipsy, not full drunk, and me and Jake, sometimes we had a few drinks and...well, it was no big thing there for us. But I know you got reason to be wary of it after what happened with Eliza. Mind wasn’t in a good place to remember, but I’m sorry I forgot.”

“I don’t remember nothing at all from that night with Eliza. And if that’s gonna happen, you and me, I want to remember every moment of it, clear as day, for the rest of my life.” He looked right at her as he said it, and she felt those words right in her heart and soul, and parts further south too admittedly. 

“So you want that?” Coaxing him along, trying to give him the words if he needed it, though he seemed to be doing an admirable job without it.

He gave a slow exhale. “Yeah. I’ll always be your friend. Means more to me than anything, what we got already. And if you want...me, all right then. But if it’s always gonna be Jake, that’s all right too. I wouldn’t never take him from you. I thought maybe I’d be all right, just you wanting me. But I can’t. Can’t be a husband to you everywhere except your heart. I tell myself it should be fine, but it ain’t.” 

She understood that well enough. He could be her friend, or her man, but he couldn’t play the part of a husband anymore, particularly not asking him to do so in bed. All right then. Time to state her own troubles, as it were. “You and Eliza wasn’t in love. I know that. But you got that guilt rooted in you as deep as I got my love for Jake. If you can’t let go, that’s your right. I don’t know that pain of losing a child. But I want a husband. I want kids. Jake and me never got the chance. Waited long enough, and I ain’t getting younger. So I want them, and real soon. And I want that with you, but if it ain’t what you want, I can’t give that up. You’ll always be my friend, but I can’t do this by halves neither.”

When she pulled her hand back, she saw the moment he noticed her ring was gone, the way his eyes widened even more than they already were. The moment hung there, balanced delicately on a razor’s edge. “So what is it you want?” she asked him.

He recovered quickly enough, reaching out, taking her hand between his. “You and me, always. Getting some land when we can. Raising some horses. Raising some kids. That’s what I want, more than anything. I love you. Have for a while now. And if you’ll have me, I...I swear I’ll make you happy.”

So she wasn’t alone in this, and hearing him say it that plainly felt like it released a pressure inside her that she hadn’t even fully known was there. She couldn’t help it, stepping in and holding him tight. Feeling his heart beat faster suddenly, and hers was racing too, and then he closed his arms around her in turn. God, it felt so good. “You already do make me happy. Cause I love you too. Have for a while now, I expect. And it’s a pretty good dream, ain’t it?”

“Yeah.” His breath stirred lightly in her hair. “I could make you a widow again, though. Like I said, gonna have TB and the law after me all my life.” Even as he tried to say all that, deny himself this and doubt he could give her a good life, she felt how he held her even tighter, obviously not wanting to let go.

“Sure. Or it could be bears, or Del Lobos, or I could die of any of that, or childbirth. Or hell, falling down the stairs. We don’t ever know what’ll happen. And if someone told me that Jake and me would have less than three years, I’d still have married him. The end hurt real bad, you know that, but having none of him would hurt more. So whatever time we got, it’s worth it.”

“Well, I guess everyone already thinks we’re married.” She heard the rough edge of emotion in his voice. “But you’re a good woman. The best. You deserve the best I got. And I’m tired of pretending things. I want to marry you, for real.”

She kept holding on to him, not wanting to let go just yet, but she couldn’t help but smile, heart so full in that moment it felt about like it might burst. “I did say you ought to get a chance for being a real husband someday.”

“That a ‘yes’?”

“Course it is.” She wasn’t sure exactly which of them let go, and how long it was, but he had a ring, even. So that finger of hers hadn’t stayed bare all too long. She looked at it, platinum and a green stone, wondering exactly how long he’d carried that ring and that hope. But she could ask more about that later. She looked up at him. She’d kissed him last night, something wild with all that desire and hope unleashed between them, and she could look forward to more of that, but the look in his eyes right now while he looked at her, that dazed sort of elation and the smile he couldn’t quite keep off his face, was a sight fit to remember. She teased him gently, “You gonna leave a gal hanging, or do you mean to kiss me?”

“What? Oh.” The smile turned sheepish for a second, but then he let go her hand. Those big hands of his could be surprisingly delicate, and his touch was gentle as the brush of a feather as they framed her face. This kiss was something far softer than last night, all that hidden sweetness and love he’d carried around inside him for years and years longing to give it to someone, all aching tenderness and hope. She couldn’t help but give it right back to him, all those hopes of having something fine and good again, the love she’d buried beneath the fear that she’d become something ruined, and then something terrible in her quest for revenge. 

Even when he stopped kissing her, he kept hold of her hand. “Tell me something.”

“Sure.” 

She expected him to maybe ask when she’d known, or maybe something about the wedding, or the like. But he surprised her. “I know how loyal you are. Hell, you wouldn’t quit on me, even when I would. Do you need to go back to Ambarino, make your peace with things?”

That startled her, because she hadn’t really let herself consider it that much. She’d had thoughts she ought to see Jake at least once, true, but it was so far away. “It’s one hell of a trip, Arthur.”

“Didn’t ask if it was convenient,” he argued, though he was gentle about it. “I asked if it was a thing you needed. And if we’re talking kids about as soon as possible, you ain’t gonna find it easy to get out even past Colter if you’re pregnant, or we got kids to look after.”

He wasn’t wrong on that, but she tried to think, joking a little with him to give herself a few moments to do it. “Well, I don’t know about making a baby _right now_.” 

“It ain’t the most ideal location,” he agreed dryly, glancing around the bluff. “I mean, I’d like to make it home at least to a proper bed, if that’s where you’re inclining.”

They could, and the desire was right there now that it was so very possible, but so was the nervousness. “We could be real scandalous folk, and wait for the wedding night.” She reached out, cupping his jaw, stretching up to kiss him lightly again, giving a light tug on his hair. “After all, I should let someone have a chance to warn an innocent boy like you about the whole beastly business.” 

He gave a low chuckle at that, one arm going around her waist. “Oh, shut up. I ain’t that ignorant. And if you think I’m gonna lie there and think of America, never gonna happen. Had more than enough of being flat on my back and having other folk do things, thanks.”

At least he could make fun of his early months in Las Hermanas. That was good. She couldn’t help but laugh in return, enjoying the banter. Sure, they’d joked about sex already, but it hadn’t been serious. Now it was. Another line crossed, and here they still were. “Being honest, I ain’t in no rush. We both got things to be nervous about. Whenever it comes around, fine.” At some point she’d probably turn to him in that bed, or after dinner, and the moment would be the right one. Until then, better to let things between them settle a bit more, and better prepare it to bear the weight of that future they both wanted. 

“No argument from me there.” His other hand went to hers, holding on again, as if he couldn’t quite believe he could do so now without fuss or fanfare, or worrying that he held on a bit too long or too tightly for a friend. “But you didn’t answer me about the old ranch.”

She sobered a bit at that, trying to give the question its due consideration. “You ain’t wrong. It gets harder to get up there once we have family of our own, and somewhere we’re settled. Trust me, I know better than you that you get tied to the land. That’s a thing that sticks. I need to go back at some point. Face that. Pay my respects to Jake. I said my goodbyes to him that mattered, but laying flowers there at least once, sure. It ain’t a thing I need to do before marrying you, if that’s what you was really asking.”

“Maybe a bit, maybe not entirely though.”

“But maybe no time like now. Start with a clean slate, as much as the two of us can. It’s April. The thaw should be in. ‘99 was real unusual. We’d thawed weeks before that blizzard hit.” 

He nodded at that. “We could go after my next Cactus session.” That was about a week out still, by Sadie’s reckoning. “That’ll give us two weeks. Still can’t ride as long days as I used to, but it should be enough, just about.”

“It’ll be harder going. Can’t take the train through Blackwater. Gonna be riding the whole way from MacFarlane’s.” Though even being able to go to Blackwater wouldn’t help that much. “It’s a long ride, I know that for sure.” But he’d done it before for her, because Beaver Hollow to Hanging Dog Ranch was no short jump either, and he was a hell of a lot healthier now than he’d been at that point.

“You got me from Wapiti all the way here. Hardly like I can quibble about going with you to Ambarino for a thing you need.”

“All right then. Then I guess we’d best see about getting married.”

“What, right now?” She could tell he was teasing her.

She playfully pushed on his shoulder, plucking up a fold of his pale blue work shirt between her fingers. “No. Ain’t no shotgun wedding. We’ll get to Escalera soon, order something nice to wear. Find some wedding rings. Get married in a few weeks when we get back from Pinetree Gulch, I guess.”

“Get married in May, I think,” he told her quietly. “We both got enough hard memories in May, we could do with having a real fine one.” She nodded, seeing the sense in it. “Talk to Calderón, I’m thinking? Can she even marry you and me?”

“I’m a preacher’s niece, Arthur, I don’t know that much about Catholics. But yeah, if she can do it, she should.” It made far more sense than someone in the Chuparosa mayor’s office, or riding across the border to find some Protestant minister, impersonal as that would be. She’d gotten married in Blackwater by a preacher who’d known nothing about them beyond the fact they wanted to get married. She’d wished Uncle William was alive to do it, though, or maybe that they’d gotten married back in Tumbleweed still by someone familiar. Calderón knew them both, loved them both.

“You wanna go ask?”

“What, right now?”

“You got more pressing concerns I don’t know about? That other gal or fella you was wanting to bring home, maybe?”

“Oh, stop.” She rolled her eyes, but then made sure to look right at him as she said it. “You’re all I need, you know that?” 

Watching the way his eyes lit up hearing a thing like that, she thought it would never lose its joy for her. Being able to say things that openly now, rather than the careful dance they’d been doing a while now, felt like a gift. “We’ll see if you say that after the wedding night,” he joked. 

“From the way you was kissing me last night, I think we’ll be just fine.” She shot him a glance then with a smirk, seeing him swallow a bit hard. She had to ask, “That song, was you really trying to say something by it? It done the trick, either way.”

“Ain’t sure. I wasn’t thinking it, but can’t say I wasn’t hoping it would tell you something once I done it. Even a silly little song like that. Don’t remember the rest. Something about a bicycle, right?”

“Yeah. ‘A bicycle built for two’, it was.” She remembered the song. She’d have to put it in her songbook now. “I ain’t never been on a bicycle.”

He stooped to pick up their hats, handing hers to her. She put it back on her head, grateful for the shade now. “Me neither. Guess I prefer a horse. Good thing we ain’t planning on farming bicycles. Or them horseless carriages.” 

There was an image. Climbing up into the saddle, she moved Bob closer to Buell and said, “Guess you could call me Daisy if you want. Sometimes. When we’re alone. I kinda like it.” A silly little pet name, sure, but it felt all the sweeter for it. 

He genuinely was blushing at that. “Well, I said you could use ‘Art’ if you like, so…anyway. We going to Las Hermanas?”

“Sure. Race you.”

It felt good to let Bob race across the desert, feeling lighter and more full of happiness than she had in years now. The wind at her back, the sun high overhead, a bright and beautiful day now. Buell overtook them past Las Ogros, and push as she might, she couldn’t quite catch Arthur. Buell had a few more hours of rest, which helped. Though surprisingly, he pulled up just short of the gate at Las Hermanas, and she skidded Bob to a stop as well. “Don’t need you to let me win, Arthur.”

“No, but I did learn a few bits of etiquette. Ladies ought to go first,” he said with a polite nod towards the gate.

“Aren’t you the proper gentleman.”

There was a sudden twinkle in his eye, and he gave her a sly grin. “From what I hear, ladies ought to come first too. That make me a proper gentleman?” 

She stared at him for a moment, pretty sure her jaw dropped, and then she recovered, unable to do anything but laugh. All right, he might not have put it into practice all that much, but he was right, he was no blushing innocent. She should have remembered the bawdy jokes, the amazingly dirty songs sung around the campfire. “It certainly does,” she assured him, nudging Bob’s sides with her knees, wondering if he saw her blushing as she speculatively eyed those big hands of his. 

They found Calderón in her small office, sitting at her desk and writing letters. She glanced at Sadie first, then at Arthur, and sat back, smiling. “Well, then. Both of you coming to find me at once. Shall I assume congratulations are in order?”

He reached out and took her hand. “We want to get married. If you can do it, being as we ain’t Catholic and all.”

Calderón nodded at that. “I’m honored that you would ask. And I’m delighted for both of you.” The smile that stayed on her face confirmed that well enough. “And I can marry you, but with some restrictions.”

“Those being?” Sadie asked.

“I can’t marry you inside the convent, and it wouldn’t be considered a religious service by the Church. For all intents and purposes, it’s a civil wedding.”

“That don’t matter none,” Arthur said, shaking his head. “Married is married, God can sort all the rest out.” 

“We’ll figure out where. I think just something real quiet. Folk already think we’re married, no need to make a big show of correcting them on that.” She glanced over at Arthur, wanting to see if he seemed annoyed by that idea at all. After all, she’d been married before, and even then, a private wedding had been more than good enough. But maybe he wanted some kind of to-do.

He must have seen her questioning look. “You and me is all we need,” he told her.

“Of course. Did you have a date in mind?”

“Early in May. We got some things up north to take care of, back at my old place, but after that, no reason to wait.”

“May 1st, then? A fresh start for a new month. And it’s a Wednesday, so much easier than a Sunday.”

“Good,” Arthur said with a nod, breaking into a shy smile. “I like that.” It sounded like a fair idea to her too. Turn the page to May with something beautiful to remember, and that would even better help balance out the memories of sorrow to come later in the month.

Calderón jotted a note of it. “I suppose if anyone notices, you can say you found out the person who married you was some kind of fraud, so you’re quietly fixing that now.”

“Quite the tale-spinner, Calderón, ain’t you?” she said with amusement.

“I had to learn,” the older woman told her, with her own smile. “Sometimes it’s better to spin a small lie so that you can live a bigger truth, isn’t it? Besides, it’ll give people something interesting to talk about, so they won’t go digging.”

“Guess it’s better to be the folk who got married by a fake preacher than them getting anything close to the truth,” Arthur said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully and sighing. “You know how they’d talk, us pretending to be married all this time.” 

“Does it count if we weren’t really living in sin?” she couldn’t help but quip.

“Since neither of you have to make confession, if that’s changed since last night,” Calderón told them, her tone dryly humorous, “particularly within the convent, I would rather not know.”

She felt the heat flare in her cheeks, and looked over to see Arthur blushing furiously too. She’d sure as shit thought about it for a moment, but far better that they’d held off, tipsy as they’d both been. Couldn’t help feeling like she had in the years between Jake asking her to marry him and her mother’s death, sneaking back from a stolen hour or so with Jake, and anxiously wondering if May Griffith somehow knew what she’d been doing. Never mind she was a woman grown, some things just couldn’t be outgrown. “Nothing of the kind,” Arthur assured Calderón, giving an awkward cough.

“Ah, wonderful.” She stood, came out from behind her desk, taking Sadie’s hands in hers first, kissing her on the cheek, then going to Arthur and doing the same. “I know you’ll be very happy together.”

In that moment, she thought that didn’t seem too absurd an idea. Felt too much like she’d been handed a gift she could barely believe--hope, love, dreams of a future she’d thought lost forever. She felt Arthur’s arm slide around her waist, pulling her close, still a little hesitant as if he could barely believe he had the right to it yet. But the boundaries had relaxed some already. She wanted to touch him, and not necessarily in terms of getting his clothes off. Just small things. Putting her hand on his cheek, seeing his eyes alight at it. Fall asleep with no more need for that careful distance between them, her head on his shoulder, listening to his heartbeat and the sheer miracle that was his steady, easy breathing. Run her fingers through that dark honey-blond hair of his, and she liked it a bit longer like this for that very purpose. Maybe finally get that shoulder rub she’d thought about. She’d seen how hungry he was to be touched even in the tiniest show of affection, how he’d slowly eased out of his startled stiffness at it even as she felt him yearning for it, but maybe she’d been missing some touches too, without recognizing it. “Yeah. We will.” She said it with sheer confidence. They’d fought so hard to get this far. That only meant they’d treasure what happiness they had.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
I asked and Sadie says she will. SHE WANTS TO MARRY ME. I can’t hardly believe it. Like some dream that’s far too fine but one I won’t never have to worry about waking.

“Lucky at cards, lucky in love.” Hosea taught me that, and what I needed for both. If I can make her half so happy as Bessie was then I think I shall be doing all right. He was right. Some things are worth the gamble.

 **Sketch of Sadie at Ojo del Diablo, with a few doodled hearts and daisies** , captioned “Since I am using her name does this make me the soon to be Mr. Sadie Griffith?”

 **Sadie’s Journal**  
Couldn’t imagine being this happy again but somehow I am, and he is, and that’s a thing that’s real and true. Like we both got a second chance, and broken and bruised as we both was somehow it still ain’t too late to chase some dreams. So we shall, him and me.

 **Lyrics and tune for “Daisy Bell (A Bicycle Built for Two)”**  
Collection notes: “Music hall tune that was everywhere about five years back and has stayed everywhere since, so I ain’t sure I can pin down one person for this. It’s ubiquitous is what it is.”

Personal notes: “‘Give me your answer do’, is it? Arthur asked, and I gave him his answer. I said yes.”


	25. Chuparosa II: Arcadia For Adventurers

They hadn’t been out so far as Nosalida just yet to see, but Arthur had to imagine much like Shady Belle and other places left behind to neglect as has-beens, Nuevo Paraiso’s former capital likely would slowly and quietly sink beneath the surface of history. 

Allende had come in a bare four months ago and every time he and Sadie went to Escalera, as the new capital, it changed. When they’d brought in their first bounty in January, there was little aside from the _Comandante’s_ office, the store, and the market surrounded by its cluster of adobe houses. Even Chuparosa had more to offer at that point than the sleepy little Punta Orgullo town now tapped for a greater destiny.

He doubted it would ever become a great big city like St. Denis, but once again, there were workmen laboring hard to build. The town kept moving further up the slope of the ridge, white adobe buildings shining clean and new in the sun like decorations on the tiers of a cake. Glancing up towards the crest, the bones of what the state’s governor obviously intended to be an impressive home rose against the desert sky. A bit rough and ready still, growing in an awkward leap, but there was an exuberance here in its people, the electric charge of being part of something big and meaningful, the push towards a brighter future. He could see that quiet confidence and excitement in their faces. 

The people believed in Allende, in the potential for change given one of their own finally in power. They believed their town, their state, held better days ahead from the hell that Javier had talked about around the campfire. Seemed only fitting to be here today, thinking of his own future. If nothing else the tremendous growth of the capital meant they had a dedicated tailor and seamstress, probably with an eye towards the need of future parties and balls up at the governor’s mansion.

Getting measured by the tailor, he’d described the suit he’d lost thanks to that detour to Guarma. Trelawney had touted that one as nothing but the best. He’d managed to pass for a high roller on the _Grand Korrigan_ wearing that, so there was something to Trelawney’s opinion there. If a man couldn’t put on his best for his wedding, when could he?

The tailor, Juan Rivera, nodded in excitement. “Silk brocade for the lapels, yes--and what would you like for the vest? Tie? You seem like a man who doesn’t fear the flair of adding a little color to his wardrobe.” He made a face. “So many American men--black, grey, white. All they can stand to wear. You’d think it would kill them to show some personality.”

“Vest and tie, not sure. My wife will be along. Told me she’d be along to give you some fabric for it that goes with her dress.” She’d grinned at him and told him not to worry, that she had to wear it too, but it was bad luck to see the dress before the wedding. He’d humor her in that. Hell, he’d humor her in most anything. _Getting married_. He could still hardly believe it.

“Your wife--but this suit is for your wedding?” Rivera’s brow creased in confusion as he measured Arthur’s arm with his tape.

Shit. He’d gotten caught out on that, so instinctively used to calling her his wife. Though in a few weeks he’d be right back to that, and in earnest, so he wasn’t going to put too much effort into changing it. “Wife. Fiancee. It’s a little,” he tipped his hand from side to side, “unclear. Turns out the fella who married us back in America may have been a fake preacher? We ain’t quite sure. So, we’re, uh, doing it again, just in case. And since this might be the actual wedding, she wants us looking real fine for it again.” He silently thanked Calderón for cooking up that story. It was perfect. Explained the situation, and also explained why they’d bother with something like fine clothes fit for a wedding, but preferred to do it relatively quietly all the same.

Rivera chuckled at that. “Understood. Then I’ll make certain you look your best, whether it’s your actual wedding or just insurance.”

Sadie walked in just as Rivera handled the bill, carrying a package wrapped in brown paper. “You boys having fun?”

“Ah, the lucky bride,” Rivera said. “Imelda took care of you, _señora_?”

“Real good,” Sadie answered, putting the package on the counter. “Here’s that fabric.”

“So what we got here?” He reached for it before Rivera could. 

She lightly swatted his hand. “Told you, it’s bad luck!”

“You said I couldn’t see the dress,” he argued. “I’m gonna see this before the wedding when I pick up the order anyway. And this sure ain’t a dress, unless you got plans for putting me in one that I don’t know about.”

She rolled her eyes at that, but she was smiling all the same. “Fine, mister, have it your way.” She unwrapped it. Finely striped burgundy silk, and then a darker solid shade of it too. He tried to not imagine what her dress would look like, and also tried to not imagine her out of it. “Vest from the stripes, tie from the solid.”

“ _Sí_.” Rivera eyed them, gave a slight nod of approval. “A good color on both of you, I’d say.”

As they walked out, he said, “Didn’t go for white?”

“You don’t wear white for a second wedding,” Sadie answered, touching him on the arm, and the quiet thrill of that ran through him. Three days now since Ojo del Diablo, and they hadn’t pressed much beyond what physical intimacy they already had, true, aside from some damn fine kisses. But something felt different all the same. There was an ease to it now, being able to do little touches like that and not worry that it might be taken wrongly, and so they both ran with that like crazy. There was a new awareness all the same too, released from the guilt of thinking all of it impossible, so maybe they’d swapped the tension of a thing unresolved for a thing not yet explored, but for all that, there was no hurry. 

She was willing to--no. He forced himself to stop, and correct that. She’d said it plainly enough. She _wanted_ to be with him. Somehow, improbable as it seemed, he apparently made her happy. God, if only he could keep that up the rest of his life, he’d count it effort well spent. Mostly he was glad to see that a few things had changed, an easing of some barriers and boundaries, but the core of it all remained the same between them. She would be his wife but she was still his friend first, capable of laughing at his silly jokes or talking sense into him. 

“Besides, I had my white wedding dress with Jake. Never could wear it after that. It was so pretty, but it just stayed folded up in a trunk. No more use to me. There’s something quite fine in being able to put on your wedding clothes again sometime. Like being so happy together as you was that day don’t have to be a once in a lifetime thing.”

“Sure.” Maybe that was part of why he’d ordered that suit so like the one he’d lost. Time to have a good memory in it, not all boats and bills and bullets and blood and bad plans.

Compared to the whipsaw back and forth he’d had with Mary, all delirious love or frustrated dislike, being with Sadie still felt good and solid. She liked him, she loved him, he made her happy rather than being half-reluctantly in love with him. Something that felt like pure grace handed right to him, and he felt himself alternating between elation and terror, because it couldn’t be so easy as to simply accept that dream and hold it close as his own, could it? Somehow it felt like there was some catch, or a price to be paid, and he couldn’t help but fear what that might be, lurking unknown just there in the distance. 

She smiled, touched his cheek. “You ain’t dreaming, boy. No fears that you’ll be waking from it.”

No, but the sheer _having_ after so long without felt like an immense weight that hadn’t settled quite yet, and so he awkwardly tried to shift it around, make this strange and wonderful notion into a solid future with clear steps ahead rather than a vague wistful dream. He hadn’t been ready for it, much as he thought he was. Things were changing again in a hurry and nothing would ever be the same in his life, and all to the good, but he couldn’t help but pray like hell he was equal to the task. He gave her a smile in return, grateful as ever that she both put up with his constant foolishness, and somehow seemed to know what to say to settle the anxiousness stirring within him. 

Suddenly he couldn’t wait to see her in that dress. “Drink?” He nodded to the _taberna_. “Got our task accomplished for the day, anyway, and might as well see what’s stirring for folk needing some help.”

“Such a serious man of business,” she said with a teasing air. “Work, work, work. What do I gotta do to get you to play?”

“Give it a few weeks and I bet we’ll find out. Might have to kick me out of bed once you get me there.” She chuckled lowly at that, pushing open the tavern door and heading into the shadowed, cooler interior.

Though the shock of hearing someone calling, “Mr. Morgan, hello again!” hit hard. Calling his name, his former name, and he hoped like hell that nobody was listening too closely. Damn stupid of him, telling his real name to everyone all over four states, but then deep in his heart, he must have done it because he wanted “Arthur Morgan” to be associated with doing good things to some people, to leave some memory attached to the name besides the brutal thug and killer standing beside Dutch Van Der Linde.

That might bite him in the ass now, and he hurried to go try to shut that down before too many people started listening in. Seeing the slight, bearded man there, he had recognized the voice correctly. “Mr. Mason, how are you?”

The man beamed, bright eyes in a sunburned face, and the gentle fool had wandered into Mexico unprepared for the raw fury of the desert sun, just like he’d gone into the woods to try to lure wolves and the like. Somehow he’d persisted though, and Arthur couldn’t help but like him for it. Sometimes the world didn’t need to be cruel and bloodthirsty. “Very well, and yourself?”

“Quite well myself. Do me a favor, if you’d be so kind. Don’t shout ‘Morgan’ too loud. I go by ‘Griffith’. There was some unpleasantness back up north.”

Albert beamed affably enough at that, gesturing at him to sit down across from him. “Oh, dear sir, say no more. We all have our things we’d as soon leave behind.” Arthur stared at him, wondering if it was even possible the man had totally missed who he’d crossed paths with back in ‘99, let alone that he was supposed to be a picked-clean skeleton on a mountain by now.

Then he thought better of it. It might well be possible. Albert Mason had come across as a man utterly devoted to his art and his love of nature. He might not give two shits for paying any attention to the news of crimes and outlaws and all of that. It had no importance in his world and his passion. He gestured to Sadie, standing a few steps off, eyeing the two of them with a cautious interest. “Do you mind if she sits too?”

“Of course not!” Albert hastily snagged another chair from the next table over. “Any friend of this man’s is a friend of mine. He saved my life several times.” 

Sadie sat down neatly, leaning an elbow on the table, staring at Albert with a wolf’s intent amber gaze. “Did he now.”

“Oh yes. He was a true champion, safeguarding me in my naive bumbling around the wilderness. I’m a photographer. Trying to capture the splendor of magnificent fauna in their natural habitat before they’re all slaughtered, tamed, or otherwise disposed of as inconvenient to the ways of civilization.”

“An artist, then,” Sadie said, slanting Arthur a sidelong look, a small smile on her lips, her amusement obvious in her voice. “It’s a fine thing you’re doing, though. Times was I’d sit and watch bears, wolves, and the like up in the Grizzlies, just for the sight of them.”

“A sight our children might sadly be deprived of, if things continue as they are,” Albert replied. “I aim to use my photographs also to stir people’s passion to treasure those animals, if I can. So much easier to ignore them if you’ve never seen their beauty for yourself, isn’t it? And once you’ve seen it, so very unforgettable.”

“What you doing down here, anyway? American wildlife wasn’t dangerous enough?”

“Oh, the usual business. The Austin-Paraiso Desert has some remarkable animals. Grizzlies, wolves, and I’d heard about a rather well-known black jaguar--”

“Yeah, two hundred bucks on her head, that jaguar has,” Sadie told him. “Cattle’s real big business here in Nuevo Paraiso and Sombra apparently has a habit of helping herself to a prime beef dinner.”

“I suppose that’s the way of it,” Albert murmured, expression falling in disappointment. “We always rush to kill the things that we perceive as taking our property. No matter if they might have justification. Chances are ranchers have moved into her territory, and what distinction is she to make between a mule deer and a cow between which she can eat? She’s hungry, that’s all.”

That remark hit home, like a knife thrust right up beneath is ribs. He hadn’t really thought of it that way, but a few words and this man had undone everything. Four hundred pesos on that jaguar’s spotted coat. Five thousand dollars on his own hide still, technically. Thieves, the both of them, and he’d started on that slippery slope himself as a child, not knowing any better. Knowing only that here were people with things they barely noticed were gone, and he survived by it. First from his father’s fists, and then from starvation. “She’s moved around the whole state over the last year or so, to hear it. Started in the east, in Diez Coronas, and now they’ve been seeing her up at Puerto Cuchillo where folk water their stock. Running from folk, I’d guess.” He sighed, leaning back in his chair. Just like that, he couldn’t kill the damn cat, not even for two hundred dollars. She hadn’t hurt anyone, only cattle. Just trying to get by, wasn’t she, in a world that had gone and changed on her. He’d been lucky enough to get a second chance to be something different, when most of the world would have seen him shot dead and rejoiced at it, not knowing any better or caring at all.

Maybe there was a reason both he and Sadie had repeatedly ducked chasing Nuevo Paraiso’s largest bounty in favor of hunting bad men instead. Looking over at her, seeing the look in her eyes, the half-nod she gave him, just about confirmed it. “Assuming you was gonna try to get her picture, what exactly was your plan?”

Albert brightened again. “You’ll like this one. There’s a circus setting up outside Escalera, I imagine you saw?”

“We noticed, sure.” The huge red, white, and blue striped canvas tent billowing up into desert sky a few miles to the east was damn near impossible to miss as they rode in.

“It’s clear she can’t stay. Not with a bounty like that. So I thought I would try to recruit some help--and why, here you are, as if from Providence itself!”

“I still ain’t hearing the details, Mr. Mason,” but he couldn’t help amusement as he said it. He’d always liked the man’s over the top enthusiasm, in spite of himself.

“I set up to take Miss Sombra’s picture, and I have here some arrows with a paralytic agent--from the Indians of South America.”

“Arthur’s real good with a bow,” Sadie told them, giving Arthur a bit of a smirk. He shot her a look. _Exactly how much are you enjoying this?_

“Brilliant! I thought we could capture her alive, and perhaps see if the circus yonder would be able to give her a home. It’s not the life she’d have here in the wild, unfortunately, but it’s a chance at survival. And seeing such a majestic creature in the circus might move other people to value her kind besides.”

“Sometimes the life you had turns impossible. So you gotta change. And some might disagree with me, but I’d say better tamed than dead.”

“‘Tamed’, is it?” Sadie questioned in Spanish, lifting an eyebrow. He looked back at her, not wanting to get into it in front of the other man, but willing her to understand that no, he didn’t see her like that. “Think I’m putting a collar on you?” Curious realization to see she had her doubts and nervousness too, though he tried to not let that turn into the panic of hoping she wasn’t having second thoughts.

But far better to just say it and not turn it into something bigger, though he did allow himself to switch to Spanish himself, given she obviously didn’t want to fight in English either. “Other outlaws might see it as losing something, maybe. I don’t.” There would be some things he’d miss, but along with the freedom came the fear and the rootlessness. Besides, it wasn’t all or nothing, living as a bandit or settling down in a depressing city, grim and impersonal and industrial. “Ain’t sure I ever did. If I did, it was Dutch talking. This life, with you? It’s what I want.”

Sadie nodded slightly at that. “Beg your pardon, Mr. Mason, for that. Also--” She held her hand out. “Ain’t even introduced myself. Sadie.”

Albert took her hand. “Albert Mason. Sadie, and your surname?”

“Soon to be Griffith,” she told him, smooth as butter melting on a hot skillet. 

“My congratulations,” he said, beaming. “How soon?”

“May 1st, in Chuparosa.”

“Oh, I’ll be in Mexico at least that long. You’d perhaps allow me to come take a picture for your wedding? It’s the least I can do after all the assistance Mr. M--Griffith has been already.”

“Just call me ‘Arthur’,” he said, shaking his head. “And a wedding picture? That’d be real fine of you.” Chuparosa didn’t have a photographer yet, so he’d figured it would have to wait for a day they could get dressed up again and get to Escalera. “All right, let’s go see about getting this cat to the circus.” At least this time he knew it wasn’t a dog, or a painted cougar, and the jaguar hadn’t killed people like that lion had at Emerald Ranch.

“We’d be much obliged,” Sadie gave Albert another of those smiles of hers. She smiled a lot more now, these past months, and now these last few days in particular. It struck him hard to see it, and to try to believe that somehow, he could have a part in that.

Getting the horses and heading north towards the river to Puerto Cuchillo, Albert handed over a bundle of arrows once they got there. “It’s supposed to be a fairly weak preparation of the curare that will slow down the animal enough to capture, but won’t paralyze breathing. But I would suggest handling them with care and not scratching yourself!”

“Had more than enough trouble with my breathing, thanks,” he muttered as Albert went off set up his camera. Sadie heard it, and sighed, patting him on the shoulder. He eyed the arrow tips, a dark dried substance on them that had to be the curare. Clever, he had to admit. The oleander he’d used on arrows and throwing knives up in Lemoyne would poison, but they didn’t want the cat dead. So even if he’d had oleander, wouldn’t have been much use. He headed over to the camera, asking Albert, “Where’d you get this stuff, anyway?”

“From an explorer who was down in Amazonia. Now there’s a place I should love to see someday.”

“Yes, and I’m sure all them animals down there should love to see you,” he returned dryly, though he had to admit, the man seemed to have gained a bit more confidence out in the wild in the nearly two years since Arthur had seen him last. Lord--what had it been? June, maybe July? Back in the Horseshoe days for sure, the best it would get after Blackwater, when they’d all hoped they could lay low and turn things around. He’d said goodbye to Albert Mason before it all took its final nosedive, and when TB was still just a word that happened to other people, not his reality. It felt startling to meet someone again from those days, before everything had changed so utterly. But if he was a different man since then, why not Albert Mason? 

Camera set up and ready, Albert gestured to them. “Stand just there near the jetty, if you would. Let me test it with a picture of you two, if you wouldn’t mind? The equipment’s traveled so far.”

“Just don’t be hanging it in no gallery this time, please,” Arthur said dryly. “Flattered as I was by the thought.” The last thing he needed was folks in St. Denis or Chicago or wherever seeing a supposedly dead man captured by a camera down in Mexico. It was one thing to imagine someday risking going back to Valentine or Rhodes, with memories faded by years, and a brief encounter at best. Hanging his picture on the wall for everyone to see for an indefinite period of time? That felt like one damn poor idea.

“He’s shy about all that,” Sadie told Albert, putting an arm around Arthur’s shoulders for a moment. “But it’s real kind of you. And I keep telling him he’s one fine looking man, but does he believe me?” She sighed, shaking her head. _Fine looking man, huh?_ That lit a spark within him all the same. She’d said it before, a time or two, but that was an abstract thing, like how he’d acknowledged her prettiness. Now? Knowing she noticed him that way--yeah, all right, it did something to him, in ways both innocent and wicked. 

So they stood there, two folks in their dusty clothes, and maybe there was something fine to that too. They’d get a wedding picture, but this would be them on an ordinary day, and there was something reassuring to that. Picture done, Sadie gestured to the horses. “I’m gonna take them and get them behind you. Last thing we need is Sombra taking a shine to horsemeat today instead of going for a steer.”

Then it was waiting, eyeing the scrubby bits of cover where the jaguar might be. “I saw your pictures up in the gallery in St. Denis. Folk seemed to like them.” In between being shocked at Charles Châtenay’s paintings, of course. 

“That’s very kind of you.” 

Sadie made a sound, gesturing towards one patch of scrub, and Arthur glanced there, seeing the graceful slink of that darkly spotted coat. Aptly named, she was, moving even in the sunlight like a shadow, and at night she’d have been damn impossible.

“You got your shot?” he asked Albert in an undertone, seeing he’d ducked over the cover of his camera.

“Getting it--oh, isn’t she wonder?” He couldn’t help a smile himself at the wonder in the man’s voice. The man likely held more awe like that for the creatures of the wild than most women, no matter how painted and gussied up they might get. “All right, if you’ll do the honors.”

He followed the jaguar as she crept through the cover towards a huddle of a few steers, trying to think this over. Didn’t want to shoot as he usually would with the arrow, wanting a clean kill up in the chest or neck. So he aimed for her hindquarters, and eased off the bowstring just a little too, not needing to propel it so deeply as usual. He let it fly and the coughing snarl told him he’d hit, and the way she scampered off.

“Well, let’s see if that curare of yours is gonna work. We’re gonna have to track her.”

“You can do that, I assume?”

“She’s the better tracker,” he said, gesturing to Sadie. “But yeah, she can.”

“Following a blood trail ain’t too hard,” Sadie answered, gesturing to the red drops stark against the white sands of the western desert. But it was droplets rather than a spray of a poorly shot animal, so it looked like perhaps he’d done it right. “You all right to break down your gear, Albert, while we go find her?”

“Oh, I’ll be all right. I can frighten anything else off if need be.” He patted the revolver on his hip. It didn’t look too out of place. “Good hunting, or good tracking, as it were.” 

It took about half an hour, the blood droplets finally giving out and both of them having to resort to tracks, but finally they found her, in a heap on the desert sands. Still breathing easily enough, which was a relief. Sadie crouched beside the jaguar, cutting around the arrowhead to pull it out. “Nice shot,” she complimented him. “That’ll heal pretty clean.” She peered at the cat’s belly. “Not nursing, so she ain’t got kittens we got to worry about finding.” 

He hadn’t even thought of that. “That’s good.” Thought now that she’d brought up that topic, he couldn’t help but ask, a little hesitant, “When you say you want kids real soon, what you mean by that exactly?”

Crouching down beside her, binding the jaguar’s rear paws together, Sadie handling the front, she thought that over for a moment. “I mean that waiting a year or two for it is gonna be too much for me. I wouldn’t…” She sat back on her haunches, looking over at him. “You need that long?”

“I don’t think so, just…” He tried to think how to put it. “And it ain’t that I don’t want all of it.” He reached out, touching her cheek carefully. “It’s all just happening real fast, you know?”

“I know.” She nodded at that. “Been through that with Jake too. All the wanting and waiting and then suddenly _having_ it. Wonderful and scary all at once, it was.” The relief at hearing it wasn’t just him was almost a tangible thing. “So...I’m thinking maybe we need a little time, just you and me. Enjoy that, let things settle a bit, before we start thinking about kids.”

“How long you thinking?”

“Couple of months?” She obviously made it into a question as much as a suggestion. “That gonna be enough?”

“Just about.” He realized now how much of a relief that was. He wanted that with her, but a little time to adjust to being a husband, without immediately worrying about being a father too, soothed him more than he could have expected. Even a couple of months might make a lot of difference there. Plus the thoughts of Isaac were still there, and he had to face those, and right now that was all too much on top of everything else. He was about to ask exactly how she planned to ensure that--women had to have their ways or else the world would be damn near overrun with kids--but there would be time for that later. “As for now, let’s see if we can interest a circus in giving this lady a new life.” He reached down, putting Sombra over his shoulder, heading to secure her down on Buell, wrapped in a blanket to further shield and protect those claws should she start to stir. “Ain’t the first time I’ve had doings with circus cats, at that.”

“Now that one you gotta tell me.” So he told her about Ms. Margaret and the mule-zebra, dog-lion, the cougar-tiger, and the actual lion, on the way back to Puerto Cuchillo. She laughed at it, obviously enjoying the story. “Maybe Hosea missed a calling as a circus man.”

“After managing all of us in camp, him and Susan both, I’d say.” Though he smiled at the thought of Hosea running a circus. He’d have been tailor-made for it. All silver-tongued patter and ballyhoo, theatricality and glamor. “We did run a little scam at a circus once. Trelawney run some games of chance on the midway, while Hosea and me sold the equestrian director some horses. Claiming they was genuine Austrian Lippizaners. He forged papers and all.”

“And what did you sell them in actuality?”

“Oh, we sold them truly good horses, fit to train up. Just common Saddlebreds and the like they was, though.” He grinned. “Bumped the price tag up a touch by giving them an impressive pedigree, that’s all. _Mostly_ an honest deal.”

Picking up Albert again, they headed for Escalera and that billowing canvas big top. The sight of a jaguar securely tied to the back of a horse made folks stare, and Buell definitely wasn’t in love with having a predatory cat on his back. Given that would mean he was being attacked normally, Arthur couldn’t much blame him for it. “You want to go get their cat trainer and have them come here?” he asked Albert.

A few minutes later Albert came back, a woman by his side. It seemed a day for it, given she was a familiar face too. “Hey mister!” Sally Nash said, beaming brightly at him. “Why, never thought I’d see you again after all that business back in New Hanover, but here you are. Small world indeed.” 

“Miss Nash. You the cat trainer here? What happened to Miss Margaret?”

“Oh, come on now, that was Bradly Brothers, and this is the Starr and Baum Circus, which is an entirely different show! Miss Margaret, his pa died so he went back to England, so that was the end of Bradly. And, well, I’m still the _assistant_ cat trainer, but Mr. DeFarge has been real nice, teaching me and all, now that he’s becoming the ringmaster too. He’s got me in the ring with the animals, right alongside him, can you imagine?”

“That’s real fine for sure. Do we need to talk to Mr. DeFarge about all that?”

“What have you got there?” She crouched down beside the blanket-wrapped jaguar. “Oh, ain’t she a beauty!”

“She is indeed,” Albert said, beaming. “Are you in the market for a jaguar, Miss?”

“Oh, don’t be silly. Everyone knows jaguars can’t be trained. Not like lions or tigers or leopards.”

“How foolish of us,” Arthur muttered. Though somehow it made him like the cat a little better, for all that.

“Well, it seems the ranchers of Nuevo Paraiso want her shot, so if you could give her a home, it would be a kindness.” Albert gave her a pleading look. “Could you not display her, a wonder like this? Even if she can’t be tamed.”

“Part of the menagerie? The American audiences might love to see that,” Sally said, rubbing her chin thoughtfully. “Come on, let’s go talk to Mr. DeFarge. Any animal buying has to go through him in the end anyway.”

Sitting in the man’s office, in a red-painted wagon, DeFarge was a man of about sixty, pleasantly plump, with an impressive waxed mustache. “A jaguar? That won’t play well here in Mexico.”

“But up in America, Robbie, think about it!”

He sat back in his chair. “Yes….yes, I could see it.” His hand traced a dramatic arc through the air. ‘The fierce god-cat of the Aztecs, unable to be tamed!’ It could be a real draw.” He eyed Albert, Sadie, and Arthur next. “Don’t suppose any of you are looking for work? We lost a few folks. One to typhoid, then a trapeze accident--”

“I’m a mere humble photographer, I’m afraid,” Albert said.

“You’d be welcome to take pictures anytime, dear sir. You two?” DeFarge asked. “Can you ride? Shoot? Train animals at all?” Interestingly enough, one of the few times someone seemed to acknowledge Sadie equally, though what he recalled of a circus, they had women performing too, right alongside the men.

“Yes, yes, and horses, sure. We ain’t looking for work just now, I’m afraid. Can’t travel too far from Nuevo Paraiso for a couple years yet. Health reasons.” It made as good an excuse as any.

“Pity.” He produced a card with a flourish, handing one to Arthur, and another to Albert. “Well, we’re always seeking _artistes_. I had thought to perhaps establish our winter quarters in New Austin--such unpleasantness in Florida, you understand.”

“Sure.” He tucked the card away, to be polite.

Paid by DeFarge for the purchase, helping get the jaguar into a cage, they waited until she came back to herself, got to her feet, prowling around the cage and warily investigating her new condition. “I should take a picture of this too,” Albert said. “I’ve got my pocket camera, anyway. It won’t be the best portrait, but it’ll certainly serve for you claiming that bounty. You might as well prove to those ranchers that Sombra here will no longer trouble them. I’ll have the picture for you by May 1st, certainly. In the meantime, the beauty of Mexican eagles!”

“See you in a few weeks, then. You take care around clifftops,” Arthur told him, giving him a wave goodbye.

On the train back to Chuparosa, Sadie nudged him lightly in the ribs. “I see why you like him. He’s a sweet fella.”

“He’s more prepared for the wilds than he was. Mostly I just wanted him to not get himself killed getting eaten or falling off cliffs or the like.”

“Protecting clueless photographers, fetching escaped circus animals--you had quite the life away from camp helping folk, didn’t you?”

“Reckon I did. I’m thinking maybe all that was me being who I wanted. Even if it meant chasing down a striped mule and feeling like I was the jackass.”

Evening back at home was quiet and peaceful, trying to teach Dusty to fetch a stick, but mostly the dog ignored it in favor of sticking to Arthur like glue, wanting nothing more than to be petted. “All right, boy, all right.” He sighed, shook his head, looking down at those soft brown eyes begging for love, for a place to belong. “Been real lonely too, I bet.” He rubbed under Dusty’s chin. “It’s your home now, don’t you worry.”

Dido, in her usual self-assured way, hadn’t taken kindly to being evicted from her chosen spot between them in bed, and if the two of them fell asleep apart, they’d usually find her firmly plunked back down there by morning. But it was nice to not have to rigidly worry about keeping to his space, Sadie keeping to hers. Tonight he ended up holding on to her for a little while, her head resting on his shoulder, feeling the tickle of her hair against his cheek, the solid warmth of her pressed against him. No awkward defense of separateness now, worried of being too bold, of pressing where things were unwanted. The desire was there, acknowledged all the same, but it was a slow-banking fire, and the sheer contentment at having this gentler thing between them outweighed that ache still. Someday that would flip and then they’d be ready for all that too, but strangely, even now he could see that it wouldn’t be all one or the other. They’d have both, wouldn’t they? Things weren’t transforming so much as they were adding onto what they already had, and that was a comfort. The unknown was enough without entirely making everything new again.

Though after he fell asleep, his dreams turned troubled. 

_His father, always so careful to not hit him in the face--a boy with bruised eyes or cheeks or jaw was far more memorable, looming over him, that steely rage in his voice. “Out all the day long you was, and only this to show for it?” He grabbed Arthur’s arm. “Messing around in some meadow, I’d bet, daydreaming? Dreams don’t buy bread, boy. So be it. You don’t work, you don’t eat.”_

_He hadn’t eaten yesterday either, and he wasn’t sure about the day before at this point. “I wasn’t--Da, I swear, there just wasn’t no people there!” His grip tightened until Arthur swore he could feel the imprint of his father’s huge hands in his very bones, fearing that they’d indent like soft clay. There would be bruises there in the morning._

_Those blue eyes burned into his, hard and angry. “You earn your keep or you’re nothing to me, do you hear me then?”_

_Dark cellar smelling of mold and earth, the ropes tight around his wrists and ankles. Pain shifting focus, suddenly exploding into a fiery blaze as Colm moved one hand from where it gripped Arthur’s shoulder, pressed directly on the gunshot wound with one thumb. The man’s voice in his ear. “Well, if the Pinkertons don’t hang you, you’re always gonna remember this, ain’t you? You and Dutch both. Always knew you was a pretty boy.”_

_Hanging upside down, Colm telling him exactly what this was. Telling him exactly how methodically planned every damn bit of this whole ordeal had been, calculated to best piss Dutch off. He was nothing to Colm. Nothing but bait. And the dark fear starting to twist in his guts: **Dutch, where the hell are you?** Was he nothing to Dutch too?_

_Standing on the deck of the sinking ship, pitching and tilting in the storm, looking out over the darkness. Yelling frantically for the lifeboat, light visible in the distance--they’d left without him._

_Lying on the floor of the Cornwall Refinery, half-blinded and panting, trying to fight the knifepoint coming closer and closer to his chest, arms and lungs burning from the strain. Swearing he saw Dutch’s boots there, just for a moment, and then turning and walking away._

_The mountain, didn’t it always come back to the Goddamn mountain. Gasping, nothing left to even make it up to his hands and knees, crawling mostly on his belly against that cold, wet stone. Hand outstretched, reaching for the gun, vision darkening already at the edges. A boot on his hand, stopping him, and he couldn’t bear to look up, see Dutch looking down at him, and know, heart breaking, that he’d lost that last bit of **Goddamn faith**._

_But this time it was different. The boot moved off his hand, moved beside him, crouched down. Hands, turning him over. It wasn’t Dutch’s face he saw, wasn’t Dutch’s voice he heard. “You poor Goddamn fool, you still lying to yourself?”_

_No Micah, no Dutch. Alone, abandoned, as he had been. But it was himself looking down at that pitiful dying figure. Or some version of himself. Green eyes hard, merciless, expression implacable. That tone--brisk, impersonal, all business, but the threat of violence behind it. He recognized it, because that was the part he’d played to perfection. So this was how he’d looked to all those people for all those years. “Maybe she’s fooling herself for now, gone all giddy, but she’s gonna see it. Now, she ain’t the type to slip away in the night and leave a note. She’ll tell you to your face. So, you gonna beg her?” There was an almost unholy delight in his twin’s voice at that. “Aw, bet you’re gonna cry, weak as you are. Do yourself a favor. Walk away before you ruin her life. Having kids? Stop talking crazy. You really want another woman hurrying to keep her child away from you? Look at you, sad sorry little man playing daddy every couple of months like that meant something. You wasn’t nothing Eliza wanted around, but she’d let you buy time with the boy. Just like buying time with a whore, it was, putting up with you, cause she didn’t have no other option.” He nodded towards the east. “Wanna bet she ain’t coming for you this time? She’s left you. Dutch and all of them left you cause you’re nothing. You always was nothing. You’re never gonna be nothing.”_

_Suddenly there on the edge of his vision was another figure, like a hovering vulture, the odd man in black, and something within him screamed at it, because that had really happened, hadn’t it? He’d seen that man there, watching him as he collapsed one last time after Dutch left. Thought maybe he was a Pinkerton, realized it didn’t matter, and he’d turned his face away to watch the sunrise._

He must have yelled something, because as he woke, heart pounding, he felt Sadie startle too, her hand on his shoulder. “You OK?”

“Just about,” he managed, though some part of him wanted to just turn his face into his pillow and weep, and some part of him wanted to go punch something. Goddammit, why couldn’t he just let himself be happy? 

“Bad dream?”

“Yeah.”

“What was it?” She paused. “If you wanna say.”

His throat still felt too tight as he answered, “Back on the mountain.” But being able to draw breath into his lungs again helped, compared to the remembered agony on Bluestone Ridge, and he took a few deep breaths. “I was…” He wasn’t sure he wanted to say all of it, the doubts and fears. She shouldn’t need to tell him over and over the same things. That ending, though, maybe he could say some of that. “There’s this strange man in black I been seeing since Armadillo. Sounds crazy, I know.”

“Top hat, mustache?”

“You seen him too?”

“I saw him when I was sick with the cholera. Creepy fella. He was...lurking there. Watching me like some carrion eater.” He felt her shudder.

“I realized--I _saw_ him. On the mountain. Right before I passed out. I just didn’t remember it till now.” He felt goosebumps rising. 

“I think we saw Death, then. As a man.”

“Guess so. Makes sense. We was both almost dead.” 

“We’re alive, though. Alive, and we got a future. You know that. Just a bad memory is all.” She nudged his shoulder. “Turn over.” Confused, he obeyed. She pulled in close, pressing against his back, tucking herself in against him, arm over him, holding him close. She pressed a light kiss to the nape of his neck. “We’re alive,” she repeated. 

It felt so strangely good, her holding him like this, even as some part of him hesitantly wondered if he shouldn’t, that it was too much, more than he ought to have. That he shouldn’t be so needy, so damn broken, that he would wake screaming and she’d have to reach out and hold him in the night like this, like he was a child. “I’m sorry.”

“What for?” She sighed. “We can’t always be OK. I just wish...you wouldn’t feel like it’s something you don’t deserve. Being cared for. You ain’t a bother, all right?” She said it gently, but firmly. He couldn’t answer right then, but he nodded. 

He might as well admit another part of it. “I dreamed this time you wouldn’t come. Mind, I didn’t expect it the first time neither. But...”

“I’ve dreamed of finding you dead on that ridge sometimes,” she admitted, a catch in her voice. “That I’m too late.”

He reached for her hand at that, weaving his fingers with hers. “We’re alive,” he told her, echoing her own words. “We wake up and we find that dream ain’t so. And it fades. Now, might as well get some sleep. We’re gonna have long days on the road ahead.”

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter to Charles from Arthur**  
Charles,  
Just wrote you a couple weeks ago, but this seemed to warrant another letter. From all you write, sounds as though things are well at Lake Of The Clouds.

Mostly I am glad that it feels as though you have hopefully found your people. You write about them telling you stories, making you a part of their ceremonies. 

But I worry, brother. You went with the Wapiti because they needed you, and no doubt they have benefited greatly from what skills and kindness you give to them. But I know you wasn’t cut out to be an outlaw. No mistake that we all made good use of your talents but you was always on the fringes of things. You told me back up in Colter that you was with us mostly so you wouldn’t have to strike out on your own no more. I sympathize with that. All that I done with the gang was from them being my family, Dutch and Hosea taking in some unwanted orphan so I wouldn’t have to fight to survive on my own no more. It was only by virtue of being there so long that I knew everyone as I did and so I belonged. Coming in like you it would have been far different.

I done my best. Especially after John come along, and Dutch latched onto him as his new great hope, I tried to be more than the disappointment that he implied he found me to be by turning towards a new street brat. Fought to become indispensable, the best man for any job. If I could not have his love as the favored son at least then I could have his approval.

Thing I have found is that it ain’t enough to be needed. You hold yourself at a distance with it and much as you may have a place, it can still be a very lonely one to always have to appear nothing but flawlessly capable. I never truly let nobody in that gang know me--although I suspect the women were far smarter than most of the fellas anyway and figured out far more than they let on.

My hope is that you have people who truly care for you as a man, not only as an able provider. A place where you feel you can be with them and be yourself and sometimes be a fool, or be unable to do a thing, and not fear their opinion of you will suffer by it. I hope that you have your home and your family.

Count me a lucky man. I’ve found that. Sadie has seen the worst and weakest of me and she loves me all the same, and so we are getting married. 

Be well, Charles. Let yourself be happy, even if sometimes that’s the damn hardest thing in this world. A good man like you deserves that.

Arthur


	26. Chuparosa II: An American Dream I

They’d made it to MacFarlane’s on the train, and with Drew and Bonnie being as kindhearted toward friends as they were, of course she and Arthur ended up invited to lunch. Given a good, hot meal that wasn’t meat or canned provisions reheated over the fire could easily be scarce for probably a week or more, they accepted with pleasure.

Though that meant explaining why they were headed north, but given Arthur had already opened that locked safe somewhat by admitting the general shape of his past, even if not the specifics, she could be honest enough to say too, over an almost unfairly delicious ham, “I homesteaded with my first husband up in the mountains. He’s buried there. So Arthur and me, we got a couple things to take care of.”

They weren’t pressed further for specifics on that, or Arthur’s outlaw days. Somehow she suspected neither of the MacFarlanes would ask, and if the boys did, Drew or Bonnie would shush them and possibly slap them upside the head. It wasn’t necessarily that they vastly preferred the protection of being ignorant and wanted to dodge it entirely, but she sensed they were polite enough to not feel the need to ask. Their business was their business and if they chose to share it, so be it. For Arthur, she expected he wouldn’t. Talking about those days with those who hadn’t been there would be nothing but keeping all of that alive and well when he preferred to move past it as much as he could.

They headed north, crossing the Lower Montana and riding up through the thick forests of Tall Trees out onto the open plains. She could sense him keeping a wary eye for lawmen and bounty hunters, as if some part of him was two years back still. They made their camp in some dilapidated shack a fair bit west of Blackwater, not too far south of a good crossing of the Upper Montana. That shack had been there when she and Jake drove their wagon north from Blackwater too, but five years back, it had looked inhabited. Now it stood there lonesome and abandoned, a sign of some rancher’s dreams gone and shattered. But it was less effort than setting up a tent for the night, and more secure besides, so they made use of it.

Crossing the river not too long after dawn, gnawing on some biscuits in the saddle with an aim towards breakfast, she couldn’t help but look around at the bluffs of the Upper Montana and the deep, vibrant green of springtime. The shaded woods of Tall Trees had been one thing, strangely claustrophobic after being back in the wide open desert again, but this explosion of green caught her eye once again, just as it had back in ‘96. She couldn’t help but slow down and take it all in. She’d ridden to Hennigan’s Stead a couple times as a kid, and once to Blackwater, but the fertile grasslands there weren’t the same as this lush, verdant landscape.

_”You ever seen a thing like that, Sadie girl?” Jake asked her, switching the reins to one hand, pointing not at the pink-and-white flowers growing alongside the trail, or the berry bush she could spy about fifteen yards in, or the trees, or any of it. The sweep of his arm took in the whole of the thing. “And it’s September already too. My Lord, think what a sight this all has gotta be in spring.”_

_She looked at it all, wide eyed in wonder. “Truth be told, I didn’t never think there was this much green in all the world.” It wasn’t as though they didn’t get an exuberant riot of color in New Austin every spring with the wildflowers, and the cacti and various scrub plants dotted the landscape with some green. But this--this was something else. Green and lush and the air felt strangely heavy, given it wasn’t desert land leached of moisture. “Gonna see rain regular enough up in the mountains.”_

_“Snow too,” he said, grinning, blue eyes crinkling boyishly in delight. “You remember that Canadian fella who come on through when we was kids? Talked about how folk back home would pour maple syrup on snow and make candy of it?”_

_“Ferguson--yeah, Jock Ferguson, it was.” He’d hired on for a few weeks to help bring the cattle back in from the most distant pastures, and they’d all listened eagerly to his stories, his strange accent. She remembered it as the last of the honey-sweet golden years, the year before Uncle Will died and both the Griffith and Adler children learned that life wasn’t always going to be kind. That would have been ‘79, when she was eleven and Jake twelve. Though she wouldn’t mention that association to Jake. She’d rather they dwelled in the happy memory. “And we told that silly coot we hadn’t never seen snow or tasted maple syrup, so we had no idea what he was going on about.”_

_Jake laughed, but then sobered a little. “Our folks did, though. Daddy had this look about him, listening to it. A thousand miles away, and all sad. Like...like he was missing something, and it wasn’t for his sake he was missing it, but instead all him thinking of a thing I’d never see, you know?” She could hear the tinge of sadness in Jake’s own voice at the memory._

_Her breath caught at that. Uncle Will had died when Jake was so young. Not a bite from a rattler or heatstroke or tuberculosis or anything else. He’d just gone to sleep and not woken up, the doctor said it was likely his heart, and that was that. True, her father had loved Jake like a son after that, until he died too, but hard to ignore that Jake had so few memories of his father. The still-raw wound of her mother’s death flared to life again. Buried her barely two months ago, and it was freedom and loss all at once because they could leave and be married and make a new life, finally, but they’d left parts of their hearts behind them in Tumbleweed all the same. She’d likely never see those graves again. She’d never be able to ask May Griffith for advice about being a wife, or even something so small as getting that recipe for jam that she’d meant to get details on for years, the one adapted so well to prickly pear fruits. None of their parents would see their grandchildren. And God, that hurt so damn much right then. Jake must have seen something in her face, because she felt his arm go around her._

_“It must have been the same for them leaving Pennsylvania.”_

_“Yeah, but at least Grandma Rosie and Grandpa Owen was alive, for a time…” She managed to keep it in with just a slight sniffle, wiping her nose with the back of her hand. “Shit. It’s the best of times and worst of times all at once, ain’t it?” The joy of being married to him, and the sorrow of saying so many goodbyes, trying to deal with the guilt of having left._

_Some light of humor came back into his eyes. “The springtime of hope, the winter of despair?”_

_She couldn’t help but laugh. Of course he’d start quoting Dickens. “Shut up, you.” She nodded towards the north, the direction of the distant western Grizzlies, eager to catch her first sight of those mighty mountains and their new home. “So maybe once we get settled in Ambarino, this winter, we’ll figure out that candy thing. Find out what maple syrup tastes like too.” She leaned over, kissing him._

They’d figured that out, buying some in the general store in Strawberry. She could still remember that first taste of it on hard biscuits, and then making that candy in the snow that first winter. 

Glancing over at Arthur, she saw he looked lost in his own thoughts. Probably recalling that wild run from Blackwater that took the Van Der Linde Gang up into the mountains and led them to her door, desperate and fearful, carrying a dying man with them to boot. She wouldn’t ask just now. They both seemed to need some separate space to remember, and her memories were sweeter than his, perhaps, but given what had happened to Jake, they carried some barbs with them all the same.

They spent much of that second day quiet, making the ride a leisurely one, until they reached Strawberry in the afternoon. She couldn’t help but glance at Arthur, making certain he was all right still. The pace had to help, but this would be one hell of a test of his stamina, and the realization that he’d been nearly dead a year and a half ago, released from Las Hermanas barely four months ago, hung right there clear as the smoke of a distant wildfire. He’d push himself too hard for her sake. They could have rode like hell and likely made it up until Ambarino in two days, but there was no cause for it, either to themselves or to Bob and Buell. He looked fine--physically, anyway. She could see a gathering tension in him as Strawberry came into view in the distance.

She reached over, touched his knee, bringing his attention over to her. “What’s the trouble?”

He sighed, obviously awkwardly uncomfortable about it, but to his credit, he managed to put it to words. “Can’t help but think I’d have saved everyone a hell of a lot of trouble if I’d had the balls to tell Dutch I wasn’t gonna break Micah out of jail and he’d hanged right here in Strawberry. Lot of folk dead that wouldn’t be, then and since. Starting right here in town--Micah shot up half the town, he did, and for no damn reason. Wouldn’t just run for it. It was like he was _aiming_ to take as many lives as he could.” His lips pressed together in a thin line of discontent. “Not that I’m claiming innocence, mind. I busted him out. I killed folk too. Not quite like he did, but I got my share of the blame. And if I’d just...” His hand, up in the air, clenched as if grasping something, then he let it drop. “No matter. Can’t undo it. Just gotta try to make up for it.”

“Well, I doubt he’s fool enough to be anywhere in West Elizabeth.” Privately she hoped Micah wasn’t. Knew that if Arthur caught a whiff of him anywhere nearby he’d be on it like a dog on a bone, and honestly, she would too, because Micah Bell didn’t deserve to still be breathing so far as she was concerned. But she hoped that the bastard wouldn’t crop up just now, because Goddammit, they deserved some happiness without a Micah sighting ruining that. “If we’re lucky, he’s in hell where he belongs, but I ain’t counting on it.”

“No, rats are good at scurrying into their little hidey-holes. I assume he’s making trouble elsewhere and we just ain’t heard about it.” He headed down the hill, into town, and she nudged Bob into a trot to catch up.

“We’d best get some gear while we’re here, given this is our last chance for it.” The air had turned a bit cooler, though experience told her that would be an active chill still in the mountains. “Neither of us got any kind of heavy coat, for one.” They’d both left them at Beaver Hollow, and she’d regretted that lack immediately heading towards Wapiti in November. But she’d had no call for anything like that since. 

She wouldn’t suggest checking the sheriff’s offer for posters. It was one thing to consider taking bounties down around Blackwater and the like, and staying up in that region for a couple of days here and there, particularly if it helped assuage Arthur’s sense of a debt owed to the Blackwater police. But Strawberry and north would be getting far afield. For this, she figured they could allow themselves to deliberately not worry about it. Bounties were plentiful enough down south to begin, and they couldn’t make their lives center around chasing down every bad man or woman out there, clear out to Roanoke Ridge, everywhere that the gang had caused trouble. He’d have to find other ways to deal with his guilt. “You didn’t chance to rob the general store here, did you?” she asked him in an undertone.

“I told you all the way back in Rhodes,” he said dryly, “we didn’t do that. I done more than a few terrible things in ‘99, sure, but I didn’t rob the cash register of a decent fella just making a living.” She had to admit that was a relief.

At the general store, she walked in, fully prepared to be recognized, but it still hit her with a strange pang of something bittersweet when Chip Cooper glanced up and smiled at her. “Why, if it isn’t Mrs. Adler! It’s been a while. Got concerned when I didn’t see you and Mr. Adler back here the last two springs.” 

She leaned on the counter, as she had back then. “Truth be told, things went bad. Jake--Mr. Adler--he died, back in May of ‘99. I...left the homestead behind. Couldn’t handle keeping it up on my own. Not so far isolated as we was.”

“Oh, my. I’m sorry.” The glimmer of sympathy in Chip’s eyes was genuine. “But here you are, back again.”

“I remarried. It’s Griffith now.” She gestured behind her to where she could sense Arthur there not knowing exactly what to do. She glanced over her shoulder to see him browsing the shelves, awkwardly. Chip’s eyes moved over Arthur, quickly taking him in, then returning to Sadie, taking no more note of him than any other man. “We’re passing through is all, but going north to go pay my respects. So we’ll need some things.” 

“Of course.” She rattled off the list, things like heavier coats, waterproof matches, a ground-cloth for the tent. Chip fetched them off the shelves, adding to the growing pile on the counter. “A few tins of maple syrup if you got it.” She couldn’t help but smile at that memory, and Esteban certainly didn’t have any down in Chuparosa. “Oh, and a few bottles of white lightning, if you’re still in the business.” He’d made some damn fine moonshine.

He grinned delightedly. “Why, I wouldn’t know nothing about that, Mrs. Griffith, now would I?”

“Might do well to cover your basement window better,” Arthur said dryly. “Sheriff don’t care, I assume, but this town turns into some kind of city folks’ paradise like the mayor wants…”

She wondered if he even realized how menacing he could be without trying. The way he said it, a big imposing man, even a helpful observation somehow sounded half a threat. She saw Chip’s instinctive nervousness at it. “Oh, you’ve been around Strawberry, sir?”

Arthur nodded. “A time or two, a few years back. Nice town. Stopped in once or twice, I think.” He shrugged. “Wouldn’t expect you to remember that none, sorry. Just another fella passing through picking up some coffee or whatever it was. Don’t even remember it myself.”

“Well, you and your missus are always welcome.” He looked at Sadie, a keen look of interest on his face. “Say, as you’re already heading north, you wouldn’t be interested in a quick bit of work, would you?”

“What you got? Some Eastern fool wants himself some fancy pelts?”

“No, though I wouldn’t be surprised to see that. And I suppose if the mayor has his way, them tourists will need a guide. Which is what I’m after. Not me, actually. There was this young couple came in earlier today, heading north to their homestead. Looking for a guide to their land. Swedish or the like? English wasn’t too bad, but guess they’re new enough in these parts they’re anxious to be sure they ain’t squatting on someone else’s claim. And, well, you and Mr. Adler made that kind of living yourselves, so perhaps you’d be interested.”

She turned to Arthur. He nodded, eyes a little brighter. Yes, the chance to help someone out would do him some good. It might do her some good too to help some young folks starting out, rather than be caught up in her own thoughts and memories, especially heading north from Strawberry, given she and Jake made that trek twice a year in the spring and fall. “Where should we be looking?”

“Visitor’s center. Told them maybe some of the hunters and trappers would do it, but I’m sure they’d be happy to see a couple of married folk like you two take the task on.”

“Thanks, Chip.” Paying up and loading the stuff on the horses, they headed back towards the timber lodge of the visitor’s center. Seeing a man and woman sitting downstairs, she headed over to them. They looked about thirty or so, bright blond, dressed in well worn and practical clothes. “You two was looking for an escort north, I heard?”

The woman spoke up first. “You are a guide?” She eyed Sadie from head to toe with interest, turning to her husband, speaking in a quick sing-songy lilting language, gesturing to Sadie’s pants, her light brown eyes alight with excitement. “Pants! This is a very good idea. For living in the woods, yes?”

The man laughed, but not derisively, giving her a warm, loving glance. “Then before we go you should go over and buy some, _kjære_. But first let us talk to--oh!” His gaze went over Sadie’s shoulder.

“You’re alarming folk, you know,” she said calmly in Welsh, not even looking behind her. She hadn’t heard him, as usual, but she swore she could sense him there, that awareness of each other growing and growing since they’d first come to Mexico. It had taken another turn too since Pedro and Juanita’s wedding, the distance between them closing even further.

“Well, what the hell am I supposed to do, sweetheart,” Arthur muttered, “get a half-foot shorter so people get less intimidated by my just showing up?” She’d already seen how he instinctively made himself smaller most of the time, the slouched shoulders and the like, though it was likely as much his simply trying to not be noticed as trying to not be intimidating. 

“Just try to calm down. You’re out of sorts being here. Thinking about how you could have done different. But trust me, being upset at yourself easily looks just being pissed off, and a big man being pissed off tends to make people nervous.” That feeling she so easily read herself as his anxiousness and self-censure could too easily look like a threat to someone else.

“Don’t I know that, and sure, I made use of it sometimes,” he said with a sigh. “Not to mention it ain’t the most inconspicuous.” He stepped forward by Sadie’s side, and looking at the couple sitting there. “Sorry about that,” switching back to English. “Caught up in my own head, I was. Store owner says you was looking for a guide north? Can’t get better than her for that.” She felt his arm around her shoulders, a brief squeeze, and then he let go.

“You are not the guide?” the man asked, looking at Arthur.

“Me? Nah. I’m the dumb lug riding guard with the rifle.” He gave them an easy smile, though his next words carried that delicate air of warning, even as casual as his tone was. “That gonna be a problem?” 

“We should have no problem with this, Nils,” the woman said, eyeing Sadie with obvious fascination. “You have been to the north?”

“I homesteaded up in the Grizzlies for a time. Where you looking to go?”

“Our new land is called ‘Shepherd’s Rest’. Near the Little Creek River.”

She placed it easily enough, a nice bit of ground on the way to Wallace Station. “Sure.” Given that was on the way to Cattail Pond, it would barely make for any detour from their own planned route. “I’m Sadie Griffith. My husband,” she gestured to him, “Arthur.”

She pointed to herself. “I am Margit Hagen. And he is Nils.”

“Hagen? Well, you’re gonna be able to see the mountain by that name in the distance, most like.” The giddy excitement and trepidation in them at striking out into unfamiliar territory and planning to build a home in a new place felt so familiar. “You folk newylweds?” It was in the way they looked at each other, the lingering glances and the sense of a still-astonished joy.

“Yes,” Nils said, beaming over at Margit, reaching for her hand. “We were married before we left my brother’s farm in Minnesota.” She read into that well enough. Restless, looking for a life and land of their own, and given they were over twenty-five, likely chafing under the responsibilities of a family farm. Older brother, she’d bet. So they’d gotten married and headed west for a new life. Their land in Big Valley would be kinder and less isolated than up in the Grizzlies. They must have had more money than her and Jake, at that.

Shaking her head slightly, smiling, she said, “If you don’t mind, let’s go over your wagon before we hit the road. Might as well find out what you ain’t bought before you’re up there.” She and Jake found that out the hard way. Chip had been helpful as anything, obviously recognizing them for two people willing to work hard but dangerously ignorant, but even he didn’t know everything they’d need.

“Hit the road?” Margit made a loose fist, eyebrows drawing together in confusion. “Is this a thing for luck?” 

“Before we start the journey,” she amended. Their English really was good, and from their muddled accent she suspected they’d either been born in America or mostly grown up there, but they’d been among their own kind back in Minnesota enough to likely speak English second most of the time. Easy to forget the peculiar idioms that didn’t make sense on first glance.

Going over the supplies in their wagon, she started rattling off things that she saw missing, and Nils jotted them down. “Well, you sure got all the warm clothes you need. I suppose Minnesota’s no treat in winter.”

“Neither was Norway, so I understand,” Margit answered, repacking some of the crates with a careful eye. “Not much that I remember of it. I was five when we left. Nils came years earlier, but he was only a year old then. But our parents would talk of it.”

“My folks and me left Wales when I was two,” Arthur said softly. It was the first Arthur had spoken up in a while beyond amiable grumbles of acknowledgment, letting Sadie clearly run the show, and helping lift and lug things as needed. “Few bits and pieces is all I got.”

Sending them back into the store to get those last supplies, and Margit’s pants, she looked over at Arthur. He raised an eyebrow. “Don’t you pity me none. Marion told me plenty about it,” he told her. “Good and bad both. All the way to holidays--apparently there’s this New Year’s thing where folk dress up a fella in a sheet and a painted horse skull and go to their neighbors’ doors. Make fun of each other with singing and then you invite the dead horse fella in to have a drink for luck.”

Somehow she wasn’t surprised he’d figured out what she was thinking. Not so much that he’d missed out on that specific heritage until Marion, but that with the way his father was, he’d never had a place, a community, a people to call his own until Dutch saw that and used it. She couldn’t help but laugh at his description though. “Maybe we ought to try it. Sounds like a real good time by Mexican standards.”

Something brightened in him, and she saw his faint smile. “Maybe.” He gestured towards the store. “They gonna be OK up at the homestead?”

“Think so. They don’t seem like city folk. Just gonna need to figure out the differences between where they was and here.” 

“Gonna talk their ear off with sound advice the whole way, no doubt.” He held up a hand to halt any protest, smiling. “It’s good of you. I’ll hold my peace. Ain’t got much of use to say.”

“You know damn plenty about roughing it, stop selling yourself short.” She shook her head, looking at the laden wagon, reaching for another sack of oats. “Though they’re smarter than me and Jake already. Better knowledge on supplies. Setting out in spring. We didn’t account near enough for winter, cause we didn’t have no experience of it. So we’re damn lucky we got that first cabin built in time for the snow. If we’d have known better, probably should have waited for that next spring.” 

“Well, sometimes you can plan a thing and watch the devil just laugh,” he pointed out with a shrug, lugging a crate of kerosene to the wagon. He glanced at her face, curiosity in his expression. “You miss it at all? Winter, I mean. Ain’t like we got much to speak of down in Nuevo Paraiso. And the weather must have been a hell of a change after what you grew up in.”

“Sometimes. Being snowbound, not so much. But some things--how the snow on the pines looked like lace. Sunlight off fresh pack before anything set foot on it. Having snow fights. Things like that. Why, what kind of weather you miss?”

He tilted his head aside a little, considering the question, then looking up towards the mountains. “Rain--spring or summer. The shine of it on the grass and the leaves. The smell after it stopped. Everything just feeling all new again.” 

“Rainbows?” she couldn’t resist teasing him. He shot her a faintly wounded look. “Folk would point them out at Horseshoe and you’d always be too damn quick to scowl and say it was just a stupid rainbow.” Even then, coming out of the thick fog of her own grief, she’d noticed that what he said and what he did weren’t the same thing. He’d been trying too hard to seem all hard and indifferent. Hadn’t fooled the women. They’d told her how he was.

He gave a quick, awkward shrug. “You got me.”

She knew what he meant, but chose to turn it another direction. “I do at that. Lucky me.” She risked leaning in for a quick kiss, just a brush of her lips across his. That spark was still there, warm and bright. They’d backed off a bit since leaving Chuparosa, a sort of solemnity entering things between them. If they’d backed off some from the giddiest days right after that talk out at Ojo del Diablo, it wasn’t second thoughts. It was only the mission they were on--somehow, even if she knew in her mind it wasn’t betraying Jake to love Arthur, it would have felt wrong to be so carefree and fun with him riding north to face the ashes of her previous life, her old dream. Just the same as he’d need that acknowledgment of the somberness of the occasion if they’d been heading back to the hell he’d experienced in St. Denis.

He’d backed off some in respect, returning to that quiet support that still stood strong and tight between them, and she loved him for it. It wasn’t a retreat so much as simply a change of situation that needed to handled with a different sort of intention and mood. After that, when they got home again--well. She didn’t know about him, but she’d be more than amenable to celebrating their return, so to speak, and officially take another step into that new life. They’d be married soon enough after that anyway. Though maybe he’d want to wait. She could see him saying with that endearing earnestness of his that he owed it to her to be willing to wait. To be _proper_ , or what he imagined proper had to be. But waiting even this long hadn’t been a bad thing. Everything happened between them so quickly, and sometimes still, kind as she was, and how she knew he wouldn’t hurt her, that instinctive awareness of him as a big, strong man was there, how easily he could overpower her, hurt her. She could look at those broad shoulders and big hands and all at once want and fear that. The desire colored with unease, like blood in the water. 

The scar was there, but she loved him, had faith in him. When that time came, she’d face that fear. She drew back, seeing the faint tinge of pink in his cheeks. “Felipe would probably kill me,” he said, “but you know what else I miss sometimes?”

“What’s that?”

He gave a small, sheepish smile. “A good smoke. Not too much, really. Them first couple months, those were bad. But...sometimes. Just more missing the notion of it, you know?”

“I know.” She missed it too sometimes, and she’d felt that fierce craving for those first months too. These days, it was more the idea of sitting and relaxing with a peaceful smoke that sometimes came across as a wistful memory.

“You could, you know. I know you gave that up cause of me.”

It had been a sort of rash promise, her own little sacrificial bargain with God, if only she’d let Arthur survive. But it quickly turned into something that didn’t feel that tough to keep. “Wasn’t just you. Nobody was lighting up in Las Hermanas. Rude to be puffing away around folk it might set off coughing, and got to be where if you had to go a ways out to have your smoke, well, that got to be more effort than it was worth.”

Just then the Hagens returned with another armload of stuff, and getting that all jammed into the wagon, they headed out into the late afternoon sun, Margit having proudly put on a pair of pants. “They’ll serve you better than skirts in building your cabin,” she said. She worn them half the time up in Ambarino anyway. It took her until Rhodes to push the issue, particularly given the only clothes she’d had were the kind loans from other women in the gang, and it would have too easily looked like an offensive rejection. Not to mention given she was on camp work till that point, she couldn’t justify the need to wear pants. Though to her mind, the fact they were far more comfortable and practical even for camp chores than a long heavy skirt was damn well justification enough, but she would have kicked up a fuss with it anyway. Hadn’t felt able to risk it for so long, until she had.

Making camp for the evening near the old timber company camp, she saw the Hagens seemed comfortable enough out in the wilds, not looking around with the wide eyes and jangled nerves of novices who feared every little sound and rustle. That boded well. Sitting and swapping tales around the fire until the stars shone bright in the sky above, Arthur and Nils finding common ground over mishaps with moose, she fell asleep feeling curiously at ease.

Waking in the morning, stretching the stiffness out of her muscles in the unaccustomed early spring chill, they got on the trail again early. No bother from people, and only a couple of wolves venturing too close, scared off by a shot from Arthur. All in all, it was a peaceful ride in the beauty of Big Valley in spring, and she let herself enjoy giving them her hard-won advice about making a life out in the west, caught up in their enthusiasm. Arthur joined in too, given he’d lived rough most of his life, and had to acquire survival skills in a damn hurry back in ‘99 to boot, so he had his share of wisdom for two people starting out in the wilderness. No, it hadn’t ended well for her and Jake, but what time they’d had was worth it. He could easily have been killed by some damn Del Lobos down in Tumbleweed, lawless and forlorn as the place was now, both of them still tied to that dusty barren land. As was, they’d dared to risk it and had an adventure together. They’d had those seasons together, all the joy and wonder and love of them. So little time in the end, but she cherished it all the same.

They made it to the hills of Shepherd’s Rise, and helped unload the wagon besides. Nils insisted on paying them. “We did hire you to be our guides,” he gestured to Arthur too, “and the advice you’ve both given will be worth its weight in gold. You’ll always be welcome here in our home.”

She could almost see Arthur thinking _That’s a change for an outlaw_ , but he took the compliment and the invitation with good grace. Bidding their new friends farewell, they left them there in that clearing, Nils’ arm around Margit’s waist, surveying their new home, their new dream.

Urging Bob on, she turned back west, suddenly eager to put some miles on. Whether that was wanting to face all of it and try to do her best to finally cope with the lingering pain, or to get to what happiness lay beyond this pilgrimage they were making, she wasn’t sure. Chances were it was a bit of both. 

Somehow she was glad they crossed the Little Creek far to the east of Hanging Dog Ranch. The courage of having Arthur there, both fiercely fighting by her side to let her do what she needed, and then gently caring for her when she broke down, was all the memory she needed of that whole affair. She didn’t need to revisit the place itself. She’d learned a valuable thing there, that slaughtering the last of the O’Driscolls wouldn’t wash away the pain, but it hadn’t brought her much peace, only the realization of how dark and bloody she’d become. She’d done her best to fight her way back from that, so no need to dwell upon it by walking around the O’Driscoll’s former hideout. 

The air turned cooler as they crossed the Ambarino border, Mount Hagen looming up into the heavens in a mighty stony crag, tall enough that it stayed thickly snow-capped throughout the year. They shrugged on their heavier coats. The spring thaw gave an unfortunately familiar effect for the mountains, and patches of thick, sticky grey mud interspersed with the stone and bare rock of the trail. She took lead, trying to spy them and avoid them, given she’d once seen a horse go almost belly-deep in one of those patches.

Camping up along Beartooth Beck, she and Arthur went fishing, catching a pike for dinner. Building the fire and hearing him scraping the scales off with smooth sweeps of his knife, she didn’t look as she asked him, “You all right?”

He didn’t reply for a moment, then finally venturing, tone carefully even, “You mean the lungs or the rest?” 

“Either.”

“Lungs will do. Starting to get a bit tired, but I got a good push in me tomorrow to make it up there. I’ll be fine.”

“We’ll take it a little easier on the way back if need be. The rest?”

“You got your own memories going on just now. I got mine. That’s the way of it. But we can’t run from all that.” She nodded in answer to that, even if he wasn’t maybe looking. “We’ll be to Colter by late morning, I expect. Maybe noon if the mud makes for slower going. Only about an hour past there to your old place.”

Suddenly, there it was, and she felt like she wasn’t ready for it, even though she’d known it was coming. She tried to think how to say this without offending. “I wanna go there alone. To start, at least.”

Staring into the flames, she felt his hand on her shoulder, the soft, reassuring squeeze. “Sure. It’s between you and Jake. I should go see Davey and Jenny anyway while we’re up here.”

So he didn’t take it as a rejection, and she let out the breath she’d been holding at that. “Where did you bury him?” She heard the catch in her voice as she asked. “Tell me what you done. You, Lenny, and Javier, wasn’t it?” She’d never asked. Maybe she’d never been strong enough to hear it before, but she couldn’t avoid it now, going there tomorrow to see that grave and the burned down house.

He sat down beside her at the fire, setting down the skillet with the fish in it beside them, holding his hands up to the flames to warm them a bit. He spoke softly, slowly. “It was. We was the fittest men in camp just then, and Hosea wasn’t gonna trust that to Bill or Micah. We wrapped him in that canvas. Couldn’t get up on the ridge that I saw, but we took him to the north, up a slope. A cluster of boulders. We buried him there, so he could look down the hill over the land. There’s a marker. Not a good one. And we only had his last name. We realized that once we was there but you had enough on your shoulders without us damn fools riding back and pestering you about that. So it just says ‘Adler’.” He let out a heavy sigh. “I’m sorry for that. Maybe we should have asked.”

She leaned into him, gratified when he put an arm around her, holding her closer. “You had near two dozen living folk to worry about,” she told him, both of them speaking barely above a whisper now, as if afraid to be overheard. “I don’t blame you none. You three buried a stranger proper, digging through all that snow besides, just out of decency.”

“Honestly, that was about the last decent thing the Van Der Linde Gang done,” he said tiredly. “Ain’t no point pretending otherwise.”

“Maybe not. But you done it, and then took it on yourself to do your share of decent things. It’s you burying Jake, and the man I saw you was becoming, that made me go back from Copperhead Landing. Even though I’m sure you meant me to go with John and his family further than there.”

“I shouldn’t have bound you like that. I know you wanted to go with me.”

“I would have. To the very end.” But he’d trusted her with the only other thing that truly mattered to him at that point, and she’d had to treasure that. The weight of a dying man’s final heartfelt wishes made for no light burden.

“I know. But I wanted more for you than dying on some Godforsaken mountainside.”

“Why? Imagining I’d have had some fine life? Ain’t like I’d have had much else. I lost so much of me when Jake died. If I’d lost you too? If I’d had to see the two best men I’d ever known both die in such a damn waste? I’d never have had no faith in anything good or decent or kind again. Ain’t saying I’d go all feral like Micah. Just that I couldn’t care much about nothing or nobody. Not after that.” She wouldn’t have been able to bear beng close to anyone, knowing how easily they could be taken from her too, and that the best people seemed to be the readiest targets.

“You was the only one I could trust with it. And if John--no, let’s be honest. John, me, even Abigail? We was just unwanted brats doing whatever it took to stay alive. Never had no room for a choice until we was grown, and then it was too late. Ain’t saying we can’t still have a good life, but we missed our chances to not do so many things we gotta look back at with regret. We got our scars. Jack--I wanted him to have the life I didn’t. The chances. The choices.”

“I know. And I know Jack having a future, and making Micah answer for it, was the two most important things to you.” She stared into the flames, keeping her words even and measured. “So I trusted John could take it from there. They was a family, finally. Jack didn’t need an overbearing aunt. And Copperhead Landing? I was _just_ close enough still that I decided I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t at least see you buried. For what you done for Jake. For what I couldn’t do for Jake myself. You sure as shit deserved more than the dying I thought you got, but it was what I had. And I done that for you, but I done it for me too.”

His arm tightened around her, and she felt the faint brush of his lips on her forehead. He said the words so softly that the snap of a pocket of pitch in one of the logs nearly made them lost to the night air, but she just caught them. “Thank you.”

She thought she understood. For believing burying him meant more than tagging along with the Marstons. For that turning into the thing that kept him alive. For everything since.

“Thank you.” She had to echo it. Because he’d given her at least as much as she had him, and looking at the woman she was, even battered and scarred and scared in some ways, she couldn’t imagine she would be anything but an even more faded ghost had she lost him. “That’s what love is, you know that? It’s two folk sticking together, making each other better. Stronger.” They’d had that between them long ago, and she could see how far they’d come already. They’d go further yet in the future too. She had to believe that. 

They sat there peacefully a while, watching the fire, no need to explain further, and that helped settled her mind and heart for the day ahead far more than anything else could.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
It cannot be helped but all the same once crossing the Upper Missouri and heading north, the memories were waiting. Running for our lives. Hoping like hell the women got at least a couple of wagons out, and all credit to Susan that somehow she did. Mac and Sean, missing. Davey, dying real slowly. Jenny dying quicker. John, wounded. None of us knowing exactly what happened, Hosea and me least of all, and Dutch and Micah not wanting to speak of it. Riding so hard trying to keep everyone sane and moving that I pushed poor Boudicca too hard. How we had to eat her for lack of other provisions. I wonder sometimes about Zenobia, if her bones and Old Boy’s lay there on that slope still.

I expect I shall find more of those memories yet as we get up into the mountains. It is no easy thing to face failures but damn harder to avoid them as I retrace my steps of two years ago and now see all the places I could perhaps have redirected the course of things. But ain’t no point in such thinking, at least not at length. See where I went wrong and do better, that’s what I have left to me.

We met a Norwegian couple on the way looking for a guide to their new homestead, and they made fine company. Got me out of my thoughts, and Sadie stuck in hers too remembering Jake. Sometimes it does good to see folk living happily, unmarred by all the deepest unloveliness of this world. I hope they have a fine life. 

We’ll be married in a few weeks. I still can barely believe that and yet she shows no signs of second thoughts. I have been such a miserable bastard for so many years that it seems happiness that profound should rest easier than it does. I guess accepting that as the normal run of things is a way I shall have to learn. But I WILL try.

 **Sadie’s Journal**  
I knew this would be no easy journey, but it feels like a necessary cleaning of the wound all the same. That don’t make it hurt less, though it is a bittersweet thing. Heading north, seeing Chip again, seeing all the green and the mountains, brings Jake back to me in a way I ain’t had since he was killed. He is a gentle reminder now, without the agonies I had before. But perched on the edge of a new happiness as I am I think I finally realize something.

I will never lose Jake, even though I am marrying another man, though I am saying my goodbyes for real tomorrow. I mean that I ain’t losing him in both the best and worst ways. My love for Jake will always be with me and give me strength. But I expect there will always be times that make me think of him, and there will be some fresh pain there to tackle. Like hidden hooks waiting to snag me. It don’t mean the life I have with Arthur is unhappy, only that to love someone is to bind them to your soul, and that lasts forever. I expect if Arthur and me are lucky and do have kids I will have the joy of that though there may be too a brief sorrow in wondering what my and Jake’s son or daughter would have been like. You don’t long for a thing so much and then never think of it again.

I lost one husband in the western mountains of Ambarino, and saved another man’s life in the eastern ones and now he will be my husband. Maybe there’s some kind of divine justice in that. Life is rarely all either pleasure or pain, and the trick is to acknowledge that. If we seek to avoid all that would ever hurt, we would never have the happiness neither. So I will choose to be happy. Face what was done, and what I lost, as best I can, and then live my life.


	27. Chuparosa II: An American Dream II

Morning came, and with it, a mist hanging low to the ground, as if the clouds themselves had rolled down the mountain. It made for slower going initially, and the glimpses of Mount Hagen to the west, alternately hidden and then looming out of the fog, felt strangely eerie. Like being back in the misty air of the Bayou Nwa swamps, that unsettling feeling of something lurking out there, though Arthur couldn’t say what. Found himself instinctively looking for that strange man in black, if only for a moment. But it seemed Death wasn’t coming to call today. At least not freshly so. They had plenty of dead riding with them all the same.

No outlaws up here either, most likely, given they’d destroyed the O’Driscolls and the Van Der Lindes had destroyed themselves. Maybe it was the silence, the isolation, knowing they were heading into the remote reaches of the mountains far beyond anything remotely like civilization. In the past, that should have been a comfort, and they’d certainly made use of it while running from Blackwater, trying desperately to get to a place even the Pinkertons and bounty hunters wouldn’t want to run so they could shake their pursuers.

But there was getting beyond civilization, with all its flaws and ugliness, and then there was being utterly alone, at the mercies and whims of nature. Flung into a world of Micah’s harsh code that surviving by strength was the only thing that mattered, and those who suffered and died deserved it.

Cities lived by that same code, though. For all those people who ought to be helping each other, so many ended up lost and alone. He had as a child, and watched nobody give a damn. Those who weren’t top of the heap could perish so far as the so-called gentlemen cared.

It would be animals if anything, he supposed, so he kept the repeater in its scabbard on Buell’s saddle, ready to hand. Still, better that than Leviticus Cornwall, or Cornwall Junior if he shared his father’s vendetta.

The report of gunfire startled him, and he had his revolver out and aimed before he could think better of it. “Shit, sorry!” Suddenly there was a man alongside the trail, hands up. “Just hunting, nothing meant by it.”

He forced himself to calm down, putting the gun back in its holster, though that dark and bloody streak in him kicked up by the sound of gunfire still demanded to fight, knowing full well that shooting first was the only way to survive if it came to that. The old instincts were right there, and fighting Del Lobos in the desert and chasing bounties kept them keen enough besides. The fool had come within a split second of getting a bullet between the eyes. “You might want to be more careful hunting in the fog,” Sadie said, her own voice strung tight with a tension that told him her temper was up too.

“Wasn’t expecting nobody coming by,” he answered, a sheepish look on his face. “Anyway, I’ll let you be on your way. Suppose you’re right. Can’t see a Goddamn thing out here.”

“Them cougars, bears, and wolves can smell and hear you,” Arthur assured him dryly. “You ain’t gonna see them coming.” Turning back towards the trail, he held his tongue long enough to be out of earshot, though he couldn’t help an exasperated mutter of, “Dumbass,” as Sadie joined him again.

Though the fog burned off in the morning sun, and they headed further up into the Grizzlies. His temper burned off too, though without the immediate force of the irritation, he and Sadie had fallen back into the contemplative silence. There would be time for talk later, but it would have felt wrong to be laughing and joking just now, so that left him with his thoughts, retracing the steps of two springs ago. “We ain’t likely to get a blizzard this time?” he asked Sadie.

“That was rare, thankfully,” she answered him, eyes lifted to the rim of the mountains, scanning with a keen and watchful eye. “Funny how all it takes is one thing.”

“What you mean?”

“Them O’Driscolls probably would have come raiding either way, down at Ewing Basin as they was. But that blizzard made the gang stop in Colter, made you find my place. If not for that, I guess you’d probably have passed on through?”

“Well, if we wasn’t so badly messed up in Blackwater to begin, we would have run south, not north, out into New Austin.” He shook his head, trying to wrap his mind around all of it. “So what’s that? You thinking all of this is somehow meant to be?” All those deaths, all that suffering.

“I ain’t quite sure. Guess there’s more comfort to the notion there’s some kind of plan than it’s all just random. If there’s no purpose out there, ain’t everything just meaningless? Ain’t _we_ meaningless?”

“Sure. Though if it’s all laid out for us and there’s no choice, ain’t we all puppets, just about? It’s gotta be something in between, don’t it. Maybe there’s some plan, but we’re the ones who make it succeed or fail.” After all, he could have gone the other way on his TB. Decided that since he was dying, nothing mattered, and become the darkest, most cynical version of himself, free to do whatever the hell he felt like.

She laughed, a low, throaty chuckle. “You ought to try that on Calderón. She likes a good philosophy argument.”

“Course she does.”

They reached Colter shortly after noon, by his watch, and the tired, forlorn old mining town looked no worse for the wear for another two years of hard winters, which surprised him. At the fork in the trail, he gestured to the northeast, glancing over at Sadie. “I’ll be a couple hours, I reckon. You rather that I come out there after I’m done, or you wanna meet back up here?” Give her the choice whether she wanted her time with Jake and the ranch to be entirely hers, or if she’d rather have him there in the end.

Her eyes met his, and she gave a decisive nod. “Come find me.” Something eased inside him to hear that. She turned Bob and he watched her go, disappearing around the bend.

Riding down the main street of Colter, it took him only a minute to reach the ruined church, ceiling collapsed in and open to the sky, and the small cemetery next to it. Getting down off Buell, splashing down into the grey mud, he rummaged in his saddlebag, pulling out a bottle of whiskey. Headed to the backside, the grave with the small heap of stones, he opened the bottle, pouring one shot out near the wooden marker, then another. “Figured I’d come have a drink with you, Davey. Gonna leave one for Mac too,” he said quietly, then raising the bottle in a salute, taking a swig himself, crouching down.

Couldn’t help but think of Mac and Molly. The ones without graves. Molly’s burned remains scattered to the wind somewhere near Beaver Hollow, and who knew what Milton had done with Mac after killing him? Paraded him through the streets of Blackwater as a trophy, like he suspected would happen with his own cold corpse in Annesburg, maybe St. Denis? He’d guessed wrong. They’d left him there, not worth the fuss of some Godawful carnival, but also not worth the burying either. Worth only the money they’d been able to claim from his supposed killing, and that was all that mattered.

Charles had put that fake grave somewhere to help keep the story intact, for which he would be forever grateful. But there seemed something awful that there was an empty grave there for him, and Mac and Molly had nothing. Though lying there on that ridge, he had to believe that at least there was the comfort that only the living had to worry about what happened to a corpse. For the dying person, the fate of the spirit, if they believed in that, was all that mattered, not the empty shell left behind like cast-off clothes. Mac would have found his way to his brother in the end.

Charles had called them nothing but a pair of vicious bastards, and Lenny had called them a liability. There was some truth to that. The Callander twins were perhaps the only men in the gang who could match him in a brawl, and they fought at the drop of a hat, true. But there was more to them than that. Drinks, laughter, the way Davey insisted on calling Mac “little brother” because he was all of ten minutes older. Davey’s flair for cards, and his notion that playing poker built character. They’d had their own notions of right and wrong, at that.

_”Heard there’s some bare-knuckle prizefights out near the shanty camps,” Mac said, dark eyes lighting up cheerfully. “Could turn a buck or two there. You wanna come with, Arthur? If you ain’t too prim to get your hands dirty these days, running that job with Hosea. Seen you strolling around town in your fancy clothes, we have.” He gave a teasing grin._

_Arthur shot him a look. “When you ever known me to shun a fight when it mattered, boy?” Though he couldn’t help but fear maybe his relief at getting out of that ferry job was showing. It just didn’t feel right at all. Plus doing a job with less gunplay and killing, and spending time with Hosea besides. How long had that been? Felt like some of the best times he’d had in years, making plans with Hosea, spinning the necessary yarns. Glad as anything that Hosea argued with Dutch that he needed Arthur, couldn’t do without him, and succeeded in it._

_Though he still saw some of Dutch’s aggrieved sidelong glances, as if disappointed that his best man wasn’t there for such a huge job. **You want to look at me like that, like I abandoned you? Wasn’t me who run off for a damn year. You got your favored son back, welcomed him back with open arms,** he thought, the anger stirring within him. **So you go lean on him. Let little John pull his full weight for once.** Then he forced himself out of that. Couldn’t go around looking pissed off at Dutch. It wasn’t Dutch’s fault. It was John’s anyway, and Dutch would see next job that Arthur was right there, reliable as always, and they’d have two scores here in Blackwater to boot._

_“Dumbass,” Davey said, eyeing his brother. “Look who got all the brains.”_

_“Look who got all the good looks,” Mac retorted, smirking at his brother._

_Arthur sighed, putting a hand over his eyes. “Pulling two big jobs in a week, we are, and you boys wanna go brawling and kick up a fuss? Keep cool. Be time for fighting soon enough.”_

_“Dunno, but I’m about ready to punch that Micah,” Mac said._

_“He likes a fight from what I saw. Seems he’d be your type.”_

_“No, you’re our type. He talks a good game, but we’ll see if he’s a real fighter. He’s slimy. You seen him eyeing Mary-Beth?”_

_“No.”_

_“He was. Staring at her ass while she was bent over the laundry, scrubbing away. Half expected him to put his hand down his pants right there. And man’s, what, damn near forty? She’s half his age, just about. Damn creepy pervert.” Davey spat into the dirt._

_Shit. No, he hadn’t seen that, but the notion made his skin crawl. Micah made his skin crawl too, in some indefinable way. “Mary-Beth’s got more sense than that anyhow. Don’t start nothing with him. You leave that to me, Susan, and Hosea.” Wished to hell Dutch had never taken the man on, and anything either he or Hosea said about it seemed to fall on deaf ears. Dutch seemed to think there was something worthwhile in the man. Arthur could only hope Dutch was right on that, as he had been with the rest of them, but he couldn’t shake the feeling of wrongness all the same._

Drinkers, gamblers, brawlers, rough and ready, full of joy and high spirits, and he still missed them both. Maybe they would have been nothing but a pair of thugs in the end, after the gang split up. But they’d never gotten the chance to find out. Hard as his road was, he’d been one of the lucky ones in the end. 

Rising to his feet again, he laid a hand on the top of the marker for a second in farewell. “Be well. I’ll see you both again someday.”

Jenny’s grave was further up Spider Gorge, and recalling Tilly’s talking about wanting to lay flowers on Jenny’s grave, given how close the two girls had been, he picked a few of them once he dismounted, putting them at the foot of her cross-shaped marker. “Hope you found Lenny already. I don’t know what come of Tilly yet, but you and me both know she’s a smart one.”

_Coming back late, pocket full of some blackjack winnings, and good thing his footsteps were quiet as he’d learned as a boy, because he almost interrupted them. Sitting together on a log, heads bent together, whispering little nothings to each other. He ducked aside, hiding from view, trying to find another way around, trying to not overhear them but he couldn’t help it._

_Something hurt in his heart to see it, remembering being nineteen himself, and the overwhelming feeling of being in love for the first time, all fierce and fine. Like having his heart laid open, praying so desperately that in so carefully laying it in someone else’s hands, they’d be gentle, they’d be kind. Though Mary Gillis Linton was there in his heart still, and he cursed her and loved her, even all these years later._

_“Can’t be like that between us,” Lenny said, wistfulness in his voice. “You’re a smart girl. You know how folk would look at us walking down the street together. They’d call you all sorts of Goddamn terrible names.”_

_“I know that. It’s a risk. But it’s worth that,” Jenny said. “Don’t matter what color your skin is. You’re wonderful. We could find somewhere, I know it. Out west, maybe.” She hesitated. “You think about...getting out, maybe? Don’t get me wrong, Dutch is a good man, and he saved me along that trailside. But I look at Abigail, what she goes through with Jack. This ain’t no place to raise a kid. Lying to your babies about what you’re doing, I don’t want that.”_

_“Babies?” Lenny echoed, a kind of shy wonder in his voice._

_“Yeah. I want them. I want them with you.”_

_To have a woman look at you and say something like **You’re wonderful** , to make plans for a future, Lenny ought to seize that with both hands and run with it. They were two smart kids. They’d find a way. Maybe after the Blackwater job he ought to have a chat with Lenny, tell him to grab his chance before it slipped through his fingers. Before he turned into an outlaw looking hard down the sights at turning thirty-six and nothing much to show for it. He had the gang, would always have them, and that would be enough. But he wasn’t made for anything more than that, much as he still hopelessly dreamed those foolish quiet dreams some nights that made him wake with his heart hurting. The path not taken years ago with Mary or Eliza, or the insane wish that somehow, someone could look at him still and see something worth keeping. It wouldn’t happen, and when he woke and got his mind right again, he knew it, but the sickness of the idea was there in his soul all the same. But Lenny could still have more. John could too, if he could ever get his head out of his ass._

Jenny, caught up in the ferry disaster and spending her last days being jolted along in a wagon, though she'd been blessedly unconscious. Hosea, trying to talk to Lenny and prepare him for the inevitable. Lenny too, dead on that St. Denis rooftop, while the shock of Hosea's killing hadn't even started to settle yet. There one moment, gone the next.

Kids, both of them, and Jenny buried here in the wilderness, a ride even from the ruins of a dead mining town. They were together again at last, and that was some comfort. Dead folks and dead dreams, that seemed to be all this region held. But Sadie and Jake had been lucky to survive even two winters up here, desert raised as they had been. Tough and stubborn and smart, given he knew her, but even they'd fallen in the end, caught out in the middle of nowhere and made vulnerable by it. He looked around, seeing the beauty of the place, green and lush and breathtaking, but it was a stark and unforgiving beauty too. Reminded him too much of Wyoming, of another home out by its lonesome, another tough and determined woman who'd fallen prey to bad men. Two graves he'd never see again, most likely, but unlike Sadie, he had seen them the once. But he'd never really said goodbye. He carried those ghosts with him all these years, heavy as the weight of the world, because he couldn't bear to do otherwise.

_Sitting on the porch, Eliza on the other chair a few feet away. Isaac fast asleep inside, after he'd read the boy a story. Looking out over the little creek burbling in the front yard, at the sunset over the mountains, and feeling something almost like peace. He'd have to get up early, given it was a long ride back to camp in Colorado, but worth it. "I told him I'd be back in a couple weeks. After his birthday." He'd have to bring Isaac something for that. What kind of present worked for a four-year-old boy?_

_She smiled at that. "Good."_

_"He wasn't much a one for fishing. Too impatient." He couldn't help but smile at it anyway. "Guess he gets that from me." As ever, the moment he made the remark he wished he could take it back. Any words where he claimed the boy felt like holding a lit stick of dynamite. He knew she'd had to take on most of it, given the way things were, and so when she set her boundaries, he stayed carefully clear of them as much as he could, but sometimes he screwed up all the same. They'd never fought about it, not exactly. She didn't snap. She got cold and polite and brittle. Sometimes that was almost harder. He lit a cigarette for himself, then held the match out for Eliza to light hers. "He likes stories. Think he's gonna start learning to read soon?"_

_"He ain't even four yet, Arthur," her tone full of a gentle, chiding amusement, her grey eyes full of gentle humor. "Be time enough for that."_

_Though it hit home all the same with a strange kind of pain. He didn't know what age a kid ought to learn to read. Didn't know what to buy the boy for his birthday. Didn't know much of anything. Turning four in a couple of weeks and Arthur had been there for maybe a few months total of Isaac's life. Every time he came back, so much had changed. "Sure. Just..." No, he couldn't say anything. He supported them, tried to give Isaac a man in his life even if it was so little, but it wasn't his place to say much of anything to Eliza about how to raise the boy._

_But he knew how much he wished Isaac's life would be better than his. That he'd learn to read and write far before fourteen, be raised by a mother who loved him. He’d have choices, chances. Though what kind of nonsense was that? He wanted a different life for Isaac, maybe, but his life was a good one. The freedom of it, the chance to fight back against all the corrupt bullshit. That was something, wasn't it? He made a damn good outlaw. At least he was good at something._

_For a moment, though, sitting on the porch, feeling that wordless serenity, their son sleeping inside the cabin, he wondered if there could be something. If he could have this, for good. It wasn't love between them, nothing like the flash and fire he and Mary had, though it felt now like they'd been miserable as often as happy. But he and Eliza had developed a good respect between them, a sort of friendly air. He'd seen how she slowly unbent over the past years, learning to trust him. She would have married him before she heard what he was, though he couldn't help but wonder how much of that had been desperation. But if he wanted to be daring to the point of recklessness, he could turn to her now and ask. **If you'd let me, if I stayed for good, do you think we could make something of it?**_

_He could almost see that future, if he let himself imagine it. Being there to see every day of Isaac's life from now on, his birthday and beyond. Really being his boy's father. Someday moving from that pallet to that bed in Eliza's room, having a night together that they would actually remember, the first of many. Finally knowing what it was like to be with a woman out of love. Becoming someone she could be proud to have stand by her side, and call her husband in truth, rather than a polite fiction so she wouldn’t be called a slut and Isaac a bastard. Maybe giving Isaac a little brother or sister someday. Finding some kind of work, because he could work hard, that had to mean something, didn't it?_

_It would be a quiet and steady life, and it felt too sweet a dream by far. All he had to do was pretend he wasn't what he was--thief, bank robber, killer, general bastard--and pretend he could be something else. Abandon the people who'd saved his life, taught him most everything he knew, and tell them their life wasn’t good enough anymore. Why did it have to be all one or the other? He couldn't be an outlaw and truly belong in this cabin. He couldn't have this life and be a part of the family who'd taken him in. He owed both of them his loyalty, but Goddamn if he could see a way to do it. Neither of those two worlds wanted anything to do with the other, and it kept tearing him to pieces. He looked over at Eliza, the long sweep of her dark lashes against her cheekbones as she watched the moonrise, and the moment passed, the words lost before they ever found their way to his tongue. He'd wasn't meant for this anyway. She deserved better. So he'd turn away from impossible things, ride away in the morning like he had to, and probably someday she'd tell him to get lost, that Isaac was now none of his, and he'd just have to accept that. “He’s such a good kid, that’s all. Got you to thank for that.”_

He closed his eyes, seeing them there in his mind, as if they were right there in Ambarino. They weren't, but they didn't have to be. He'd brought them with him, through all the years and all the miles. Eliza, tall and slim and graceful, how young she'd looked whenever she smiled and he remembered she'd been barely more than a kid when he walked into that saloon that night. Isaac with his messy dark hair, energetic and clever and always ready with a hug, and it had startled him the first time, but he'd lived for it after that day, until there was no more little boy there to hug him.

Ten dollars. The senselessness of it still hurt and enraged him. But killing the bandits hadn't changed anything, as he'd known it wouldn't. And he’d done his share of pointless killing too. "I failed you both," he said softly, looking at them. "Not you getting killed, I expect. Though still can't help but think I could have, if I was there...I don't know. But before. You was my son, Isaac, but I never was your father. You cried sometimes when I left. Asked when I'd come back again. Damn near broke my heart. I didn't listen to that, not nearly enough. I should have...and we was just kids, Eliza. Made a mistake one night, but you got left with all the hardship of it." 

He'd been able to ride off for months at a time, come play with Isaac for a few days, help pay the bills, and pretend it was enough, that somehow he was doing right by them. In the end, maybe he’d cared more, but he'd been little better than Dutch. Just another man who knocked a woman up and left her with all the burden while he ran off and lived his life rather than shouldering his responsibilities. He'd felt strangely guilty like he was cheating on the gang every time he'd ridden off to see Eliza and Isaac, and maybe that wasn't an inapt comparison. Mary hadn't been wrong. He'd made his choice, too afraid to make any other one, and so long as the gang came first, nobody else could have anything of him that truly mattered. 

"I was a dumb, scared kid. Didn't know how to admit what I really wanted. Or what I was willing to give up for it. How to fight for it. I should have put you first. You both needed me to be, but I wasn’t ready to be a man." He had, finally, but far too late for making it up to them. He heard the hitch in his voice, felt his throat go tight. "I'm sorry. Forgive me. If you can. Please." He'd have a life with Sadie, but he couldn't give her what she deserved so long as he couldn't move beyond what had gone by already. _You have to forgive yourself,_ she'd told him.

 _Tell your kids you love them,_ Hosea had urged him. "Love you, Isaac," he said softly. "I always did. Always will." He thought for a moment he heard a tiny boy’s laughter on the wind.

He opened his eyes, swallowing hard, not feeling completely free of the weight, but lighter all the same. Whistled for Buell, and headed towards the old Adler place. Forgive himself? He had to try. He'd gone around for so many years now bleeding with every step, refusing to let himself truly deal with any of it, because trying to heal it felt like excusing himself. A bad man didn't get to have good things, and he'd cursed them by coming into their lives, or so it seemed. Far easier to deliberately rip away the parts of himself that he blamed, anything to do with love or desire, longing or dreams. Anything that made him a man, flawed and fragile and full of doubts, rather than the perfect outlaw, he pushed away. 

He'd told himself he was done with all of that. He had no right to ruin any other woman’s life, whether by loving her or sleeping with her. Clearly he was the problem. Time to grow up, and devote himself to the gang, where he belonged, rather than chasing impossible, incompatible fantasies. Shoved all of that into its own private hell to suffer like he deserved, a locked and tightly guarded prison, and the only time it ever came close to getting out was about five minutes one July night when he'd drunk too much and Abigail offered, and thank God he'd come to his senses. Otherwise, he devoted himself to becoming the perfect acolyte. Trying so much to not hunger for anything more, and allowing himself nothing. Just one more way he’d become so much less than he could have. It would have been one thing to calmly give all that up out of conviction, or lack of interest. But he’d run from it in fear and guilt. Hadn't spared women, at that, by shutting himself off like that. There were other ways to destroy. He'd ruined Edith Downes' life, and others, without ever touching them.

But now he had let all that out again in order to be with Sadie, rather than fighting to keep it locked away. Sixteen years. He'd been barely more than a boy then, not even really knowing himself, and now it was like that part of him had gotten shoved out into the sunlight after years in a cramped dark cell, staring around at the wide world in confused trepidation. Scared and withered to nearly nothing, like he'd been when Felipe let him off bed rest and he'd struggled with doing even the most basic things with his frail and exhausted body. 

He’d known the outlaw days were done, even before he thought his own personal days on earth were numbered. He'd had to let go the outlaw part of himself back at Beaver Hollow, trying to let free Arthur Morgan, the man, and hope that could grow enough to make a difference before he died. He’d been trying to do that still ever since, and he’d felt the change. He’d have to do that again now, give freedom to those last parts of himself that he’d kept carefully tucked away, the ones that belonged to a husband, a father. Let them loose to take their place and gain strength until they no longer felt so weak and lopsided.

That would take time, though, and he and Sadie were getting married soon enough. He'd do his best by her, but he wouldn't kid himself that he'd get it right quickly. It wasn't a bother that she knew what the hell she was doing compared to him, that she'd been a woman well-loved by a husband already, both in and out of their bed. But he'd have to accept looking the fool there, struggling to make up for all those years of absolute self-denial. Hosea at least had given him some example of how to be a good husband day by day, so that helped.

As a lover, though? If things had been otherwise, he would have accepted he’d look like an idiot, and simply prayed she could handle that. The trouble on his mind was those bastard O'Driscolls. She was tough as nails, stronger than just about any woman he knew, given what she'd survived. She still had so much goodness she left in her after all that suffering, and her diving deep into the black pit of her own hopelessness and rage. So it wasn't that she was some delicate hothouse flower he could barely touch for fear of bruising her. But he knew how it felt, being told and shown that he was absolutely nothing, not a person, just a disposable thing with no worth. He'd lived with that sort of shame and despair long before Colm O'Driscoll came back down those cellar steps again, ready to play one more card in the twisted game he and Dutch had. But that had opened up an entirely new level of the abyss all the same. 

So he wanted her to touch him, really touch him like nobody ever had, and at the same time the sheer vulnerability of that terrified him even more than it would have before. She'd had it even worse than him. He'd be as good to her as he knew how, but God, the things he'd learned with Mary were all dusty as hell, sweet memories of nearly half a lifetime ago, and they hadn't gotten all that far anyway. He’d respected her drawing clear lines about exactly what clothes stayed on and what they could do, given how much more she had to lose, and wanting so desperately to do right by her. So his best wasn't much. The thought of likely being foolish and clumsy somehow, hurting or scaring her while she tried to get past her own memories, made his stomach turn.

He loved Sadie, in so many ways. He'd sooner shoot himself than ever deliberately hurt her. The way she looked at him, he had the feeling she wasn't inclined to wait for their wedding night. He would have waited, wanted to be completely proper by society's say-so for her if that was what she needed, but then, she and Jake had jumped the gun a bit, so maybe it wasn’t so simple as that. He wasn't going to insist the ink had to be dry on a marriage certificate for something he wanted so badly too. So, probably soon after they got back to Chuparosa, maybe even that very night. The mingled anticipation and anxiousness made for a heady mix. He had the thought he'd better let her take the lead so he could be sure he wasn't making a complete ass of himself to begin, and to better ease her mind. He loved her. He’d do what he had to do to figure it out. 

It seemed as good a notion as any. Reaching Colter again, he turned onto the northeastern track towards Pinetree Gulch.

~~~~~~~~~~

She hadn’t dared to look back that night as they rode away, her on the back of Dutch’s horse, gingerly clinging to this huge man in his heavy coat, not certain what would happen to her, caught in a daze. So now she saw it as she approached--everything still standing, except for the tumbledown mess of the burned timbers and ash of the cabin. Quiet as anything. Chances were at least one person had stopped by in two years, some of the trappers and hunters and miners, perhaps, who’d occasionally shared the dinner table with her and Jake when they wandered that way. But it wouldn’t have been many. Whether they’d known the Adlers before that, they’d seen the ruin and turned around and left.

Dismounting, she declined to put Bob in the barn, and instead left him out in the open to graze on the shoots of spring grass that had cropped up, giving him a pat and a reassuring word. 

Boots squelching in the spring mud, as they always had, she glanced around, seeing the bright pop of wildflowers. April in the mountains had been gorgeous, and the flowers were different from New Austin, but the exuberant color hadn’t been. She’d loved seeing it. So she moved among the plants, eyeing them, trying to plan what to take. The bright red of yarrow, the white of wild carrot which her mother had always called “Queen Anne’s lace”, the sunny yellow of buttercups, the blue of larkspur, blue as Jake’s eyes had been. 

Then she stopped, halfway between the cattle shed and the front door. The paths had somewhat overgrown, given both in 1899 and last year they hadn’t been trodden down. But there, entwined with the wildflowers and grass and weeds, another color stood out, pale and stark.

Bones, stripped bare of all but a few last bits of dried flesh and gristle, and with them, the last lingering shreds of clothing. Dark wool from a heavy coat, turkey red from a union suit, what might have been a pale colored shirt. Not enough for her to remember specifically who it was, if she’d even wanted to do so. Most of the bones had gnaw marks, one leg and both hands cleanly missing, dragged off by some scavenger. She looked at the skull, separated from the rest of the body, a clean hole in the forehead just above the empty eye sockets. The exposed, tobacco-stained teeth seemed to mock her with that fleshless grin. 

She’d come back here to make her peace, but these bastards would never go away. They’d decayed and been eaten, and yet their bones were still here, indelible, like they’d laid permanent claim to this land with their rotting stinking carcasses as surely as they’d taken over the house with their guns. No, that wouldn’t stand. She found suddenly she had some rage left for O’Driscolls. “Fuck you,” she snarled, rearing back and kicking the skull, watching it and its toothy smile go flying into another patch of flowers. “Fuck all you miserable bastards, this ain’t yours, it ain’t never gonna be yours, and you ain’t welcome here.”

She couldn’t help a savage satisfaction that they’d lain right where they’d fallen, been dragged apart and eaten by scavengers, left unloved and unmourned and unburied. They’d lived like animals, so they could die and rot like them. “I’m still here,” she said, turning around a few times, eyeing the entire valley, wherever any of their useless bones might lie. Raising her voice, she told them, “You hear me, you O’Driscoll assholes? _I’m still here and you ain’t_. Have fun in hell, the lot of you. Gonna leave here and go live my life after this, and you? Not a one of you left after Arthur and me got done with you, and nobody who gives a damn about that neither.”

She headed next for the cellar, working her way through the burned timbers, finding the trapdoor cleared of debris. So someone had tried to come scavenge, and when she climbed down the stairs, she found most of the provisions gone, almost all the canning that she and Jake busily got up to in the summer. A few potatoes, dried and practically mummified, sprouting eyes like some Greek mythological monster. One jar of apples preserved in whiskey, which had rolled beneath the shelves and not broken. Had that been someone prowling around, or something she’d done bumping the shelves in a sick panic fighting to get free when they’d flung her down here, her hands and feet bound again, when they finally slept every night?

She didn’t know. But she picked up the jar, dusted it off, and put it back on the shelf. Breathed in the smell of the cellar, cool and earthen and damp, closing her eyes, trying to let the instinctive nausea from the memories pass through her and leave. She’d wondered when they would be done with her, and finally kill her. It would have been soon, had the Van Der Lindes not shown up that night. They'd been done with her early that night, hadn't bothered to tie her up again. _Guess we finally broke this filly in proper,_ one of them had said earlier that day. _Ain’t fighting like she done before._

She’d given up fighting, wanted nothing more than to die and escape the pain and fear and shame. To be with Jake again, if he could bear to be with her. She wiped her eyes, and headed to the loose board in the cellar wall, pushing it aside. The lockbox was still there. They’d kept a few things up in the cabin, but this was for the things that mattered, and the ones they’d never have much use for living way up here. She managed to pry the lock open with her knife, because the key certainly wasn’t upstairs under the flour canister anymore, and her vision blurred with tears of relief for a moment as she saw that here was something hadn’t been taken or ruined.

Her mother’s necklace and earrings, which she gratefully tucked into her satchel, wrapped in a bandana. Jake’s grandfather’s pocket watch and his father’s cufflinks were still there too. She took them, holding them carefully, then tucked them in her pocket. He’d worn them for their wedding day. 

She looked up, at the slivers of daylight showing through the chinks in the floorboards. Remembered hearing gunfire, then new voices up there, the heavy tread of men’s boots. A voice she now knew for Arthur’s saying _Poor bastard was married_. Trying not to scream because if they knew Jake had been married, they’d be looking for a woman, and she knew why. Micah coming down the stairs, grabbing her arm and hauling her up into the lantern light like they had, laughing mockingly. Suddenly she found she had some fight left because she wouldn’t start it all over again with these new men who’d invaded her home and were taking what they wanted. She’d damn well make them kill her. The knife was right there for her to grab it, and so she did.

She climbed up out of the cellar, and shut the door behind her, not looking back. Picking wildflowers as she went, filling her arms with a riot of color, she headed north, towards that slope and the jumble of boulders Arthur had described. She’d known where he meant. Getting there, seeing the letters “ADLER” carefully carved in the top of a stump to serve for a marker, she turned and looked back down the hill. 

_”It’s pretty enough.” Looking down over the valley they now owned, finding the coordinates with the help of the surveyor from Strawberry and his detailed map, Jake spoke up. “Gonna be tough these first few years, though. But at least we got that lumber in Strawberry." He nodded towards the wagonload of it. "Cost a damn arm and a leg, but trying to do our own lumberjacking here would be rough going.”_

_She turned to him, unable to help rolling her eyes. He was a fine one, such sweetness and kindness, then silly pranks and sly jokes and the like, but when pressed by a situation, he could so easily turn back to the sober preacher’s son, the boy who’d lost his father far too young. Bone deep practical at his core, her man, and sometimes that was a fine thing, but sometimes she could kill him for that realistic nature sounding too much like pessimism. “My Lord, Jake, you don’t gotta sound like someone pissed in your whiskey about it. It’s ours,” she said, eyeing it with satisfaction. “Ain’t no bank taking it from us. Ain’t no railroad making it obsolete neither. We’ll do what it takes to make it work.”_

_“Well, Miss Sunshine, we’d better get to work soon enough. Got a house to build, cause I ain’t spending winter in a tent.” His arm went around her waist, holding her tight. “So let’s go plan out the homestead, huh?”_

_Heading down the slope, they’d started near the lee of a big pine tree in the center of the valley. “House near here?” she suggested, nodding to the tree. “Good shade.”_

_Jake nodded. “Good.” He eyed the ground there, folding his arms over his chest. “Dig a cellar, get some good rock from the river for the fireplace and chimney.” He looked over his shoulder at her, a slight smile she recognized coming over his face. “Most important question--where’s our bed going?”_

_She looked around, seeing the layout of the house in her mind, and stepped back about five steps, then one to the side. Put her hands on her hips, giving him a knowing smile of her own, beckoning him to her. “Here.”_

_Caught up in the moment, they almost didn’t remember, and that sent her scrambling for her saddlebags, her saddle on a rock after she’d turned Betsy loose. They couldn’t risk her getting pregnant, not right now with so much work ahead. He wasn’t wrong on that. But fixing that only took a minute, and it didn’t throw off the feeling between them at all anyway._

_The slight cool edge to the autumn air on her skin was a novelty, as was the soft tickle of grass against her back, but Jake kept her warm. Looking up to his bright blue eyes and the bright blue sky, she held him close, heart feeling blissfully full. They’d been in her bed back in Tumbleweed, then the hotel in Blackwater, and the pallet under the wagon on the way up here. But none of that was anything settled. It was a place they had made love, but it wasn’t home. Maybe they had no threshold just yet, but this right here was their home, and this space was now their marriage bed, and that was more than good enough for her. “Welcome home, Mr. Adler,” she whispered in his ear, grinning at his delighted laugh._

They’d come to love this land, by turns beautiful and harsh, as much as the farm near Tumbleweed. Maybe even more, because it was their dream, not one inherited from their parents. 

They’d been chasing the usual American dreams: to own land, to have a home, to have freedom to live by one’s own terms. To strive for something better. But sometimes those dreams failed, or were taken away. She’d seen from from that year that it was so much easier to destroy than to build. Maybe that meant choosing to be someone who fought to make something better, or to keep something safe, was its own kind of strength.

She laid the flowers down on Jake’s grave, spreading them out like a carpet. “Hello again, love,” she said quietly, crouching down, instinctively reaching out to pull a few weeds. She’d be the last person to do this, she suspected, and next year they’d come back anyway. But while she was here, it mattered. “Guess you seen what’s been going on with me. Things are real different now. I’m real different.”

She reached into her pocket, pulled out the watch and cufflinks. He should have been able to give these to their son someday. He should have been able to do a lot of things. Ran her fingers over them for a moment, bright as newlywed dreams, and then set them on top of the stump. She had no shovel, but she didn’t need one. She dug by hand, the ground well thawed enough to be be muddy and cool against her fingers. Good soil, for all it was a short growing season. 

She placed the watch and cufflinks in the hole, hesitated for a moment, then nodded to herself. Yes, it felt right to do this. She reached into her pocket again, pulled out her wedding ring. Kissed it, because she couldn’t kiss him goodbye this last time, then carefully tucked it on top of the other things. Better this than that ring haunting some dusty drawer corner, forgotten and abandoned as she kept living and called another man her husband. Jake had given that ring to her one September day out of love and a shared dream. That dream was done and gone, and she had to live with that pain. But she gave that ring back to him with all her love just the same.

She’d keep the land for now, because selling it was too much to think about at the moment. It wouldn’t fetch much either, being honest. But maybe someday someone would buy it. Or hell, maybe someone would squat on it. She wasn’t sure she’d mind that. Someone to bring life back to the place, maybe fill it with laughter, with children, with new dreams. They’d walk up this hill and wonder who Jake Adler had been. They wouldn’t know, because how could they? She was all that was left of Jake now.

But she would know. She’d remember. He’d been a good man, one of the best, and she’d loved him. That was enough. 

Smoothing the dirt back into the hole, she tamped it down hard, trying to cover the sign of anything being buried there, then scattered some of the flowers there too. With any luck, that would hide it, and with people coming here so rarely anyway, Jake’s things would stay with him where they belonged. Sang softly for him, “Amazing Grace”, one of Jake’s favorites, proud that her voice stayed steady and true for him.

She heard Bob’s neigh of welcome down the hill, knowing his friend Buell must have arrived. Glanced down to see Arthur there, and somehow, it eased her mind to see another living soul in this place. Dutch and Micah were who knew where, and they could rot in hell anyway. She and Arthur were the only other two who’d been there that night.

He hung back, obviously not sure if she wanted the distance and privacy, even now. But she gestured him over, and so he came up the hill to her. She nodded towards the stump. “You done that, I assume, not Javier or Lenny?” She’d seen his penmanship, beautiful as it was, and even more so for a man who hadn’t learned to write until he was a teenager. It was cruder than his writing, but given it was the strokes of a knife rather than the flourish of a pen, that made sense. But she could still see the flourishes. He’d taken some pain with it all the same, for a stranger whose first name he didn’t even know, rather than just hurriedly scratching the letters and calling it done. She could imagine the three exhausted men burying another body in deep snow, only because they felt it was right.

He nodded, studying her carefully, taking in her muddy, dirty hands, eyes going to the ground near the stump for a moment, obviously figuring out what she’d done, though maybe not the specifics. She cleared her throat. “Could you…his first name. So it matches. Please.” Not leaving Jake with a mismatched marker, his first name an obvious later addition in a different person’s handiwork, felt important. Was it too much of an imposition to ask her soon-to-be second husband to do this one last thing for her first? But then, he’d been there when she hadn’t mattered to him either, and he’d still helped bury Jake and carve that name. He’d been a part of this then. He’d come all the way to Ambarino with her to see this done. It seemed strangely fitting that he help close that book too with this. 

Arthur reached for his knife, not hesitating at all. “Is it ‘Jake’ or ‘Jacob’ you’re wanting?”

“Jake,” she said. “He was always ‘Jake’ to me. To all of us who loved him.” She sat down on a boulder and let Arthur set to work, looking away. A small rainshower passed over at one point, barely more than a brief drizzle, but he kept at it diligently. She watched the rainbow that appeared over the ridge, a beautiful shimmer of color, and smiled in spite of how her heart ached. _You see that, Jakey?_

It took far longer than she’d thought, but then, she’d never had to try to carve letters into wood like that. Plus he had to be tiring already. It was a long trip. Maybe she shouldn’t have asked. Finally it was done, and she heard Arthur get up with a small grunt of effort. She looked back at the marker. The fresh cuts of the neat letters in JAKE were paler than the ones for ADLER, true, given it was two years newer, but by next spring, it would weather enough it wouldn’t show. The hand that carved both was obviously the same, and that was what mattered. But now she saw what took him so long. Below that, in smaller, even more laborious letters, he’d put something else.

She looked over at him, this man she’d marry. Couldn’t help but remember that night, freezing and terrified, him guiding her towards the horses. His arm against her back, gently helping hold her up, then strong hands lifting her effortlessly onto the back of The Count. The exhaustion in her and the need for that overcame her instinctive revulsion and fear at the nearness of this big, strange man and him touching her, even so slightly. His own exhaustion obvious in his voice as he told her they’d keep her safe until she figured things out, and her struggling to believe him.

“I guess I can be grateful the place burned down. If that ain’t happened, I’d have insisted on staying. Couldn’t have left. I would have died real quick.” Froze or starved to death, because she’d had no heart for living. No, she’d be honest. Staying in that cabin with the stain of Jake’s blood on the floor, and the memories of that marriage bed now turned into a horror, she might well have killed herself with that knife soon after they left. She’d read her Romeo and Juliet. It would have felt appropriate to go lie down in that wagon beside Jake, and turn the knife on herself. “So I wouldn’t be here now. Neither would you. All because of one overturned lantern.”

“Don’t ask me to thank Micah for it,” he said, weary humor in his voice.

“No. Never.” But that one small happening meant they were alive and here today, looking at a future together. She couldn’t help but put out a hand, tracing the small letters with her finger, the additional words Arthur had carved. _Beloved husband._

Then it was all too much. Being here again in the full glory of spring. The forlorn bones of dead bastards among the wildflowers. The smell of that cellar, and that lonely overlooked jar of drunken apples. The weight easing off her heart. The beauty of that rainbow. Knowing she’d never see this place again, feeling strangely untethered by letting go of it for good. This man who’d be her husband come May, and without having been asked, he’d acknowledge freely exactly what the man he’d buried had meant to her, and know what it would mean to her that he could do so. 

_Beloved husband._ He was all right with following in Jake’s footsteps. With knowing and accepting she’d loved and been married, happily and passionately, before him. He could have demanded she give him all that she had, jealous of every scrap of effort or affection she might still turn towards the memory of a dead man, afraid he didn’t measure up enough to matter more. She knew him too well. Little as he’d been loved, little as he thought of himself, he had to worry about forever being second best as well as second. Instead he wouldn’t try to take Jake from her, and for that, she loved him so damn much it hurt.

She reached out, hugged him tightly. “Thank you,” she said, not able to put more words to it than that. Then she couldn’t hold it back and it felt like everything dammed up since the door burst open in the night while she and Jake were sleeping came out all at once. The life she’d had, the woman she’d been, the dreams they’d had, and she hadn’t fully let it go, not until now. God, what a mess she made, sniffling and sobbing and clinging to him for dear life. But he let her do it, steady as a rock, and it hurt to breathe, hurt to do anything, because she hadn’t thought there could be this much pain still left in her, but there was. All she could do was try to cry it out because now having pulled the cork on the whole business, it felt like she couldn’t stop until it was done. 

When she calmed down some, not sure if she felt lightened or simply temporarily hollow after being purged of all that, he asked, voice gone all gentle, “You wanna go?” She nodded. There was nothing left here to hold her, not anymore. What pieces of Jake she would keep were the memories, not this lonely grave. He nodded towards the west, where the sun already sank below the rim of the mountains. “We should stay in Colter tonight. Sunset’s coming, just about.”

She nodded in acknowledgment of that, not able to say anything just yet. Let him put an arm around her as they walked down the hill, needing it now like she’d needed it then, but this time with no impulse to push him away. She rode Bob, though. She could certainly handle that. Trying to put her thoughts in order on the way to Colter, she gave it up. There would be time for that tomorrow. Right now, she’d let herself have this space to simply be. Neither of them seemed inclined to eat once they got back. Too much to deal with, and he simply looked exhausted.

Hitching the horses, unsaddling them, he led her to the main lodge, rather than the miner’s quarters where the women and Jack, and an injured John, had been staying during that previous spring. Dropping their saddles on the floor, hanging their hats and jackets in the main room near the cold fireplace, she followed him into the next room, noticing a hoop with a half-cured fox hide, and a small bed. So this was where he’d stayed last time, she assumed. Nothing fancy, but a room of his own, at least. It did beat the pallets they’d had in the women’s quarters. Though maybe they’d been lucky to have enough people there to warm the room up with body heat a bit. 

He threw one blanket down over the lumpy mattress and torn plaid blanket already there, and sat down, pulling off his boots. She did the same, then they curled up under the other blanket. Huddled up like she was against the chill, she felt a moment’s surprise at him tucking up against her back, holding her tightly. The man poured off heat like a blast furnace, and she couldn’t help but be grateful for that, and even more grateful for the reassurance of the embrace. Felt the weariness in him, knowing he’d about reached his limit of endurance these past few days, and they’d have to make the homeward journey slower for the first few days to let him rest. Maybe take a day in Strawberry even, if he could bear it. She put a hand on his arm, squeezing it in acknowledgment. Neither of them had said anything since leaving Pinetree Gulch, but there had been no need.

He started humming something lowly, and it took her a few moments to pick the tune out: “Shenandoah”. Worn out as she was, she fell asleep to the soothing sound of it soon enough. 

Then she was back in Pinetree Gulch, but a different one. The buildings didn’t have two years of weathering and the first signs of neglect. The cabin stood exactly where it ought. Most of all, she recognized the figure there on the steps by the front door, that untidy shock of dark hair. 

He held his hands out to her, and she rushed over, hugged him before she could think twice. The familiar feel of him in her arms, the smell of him, all so comfortable. “How--”

“Things ain’t over for us when we die,” he reminded her, voice mild, giving her that smile of his. “You just wasn’t ready to talk before. Seems you are now.”

She nodded, acknowledging that, sitting down on the steps beside him, as they had for so many long summer evenings. “It’s been hard.”

“Seen that.” She heard the sadness in his words. “Dying ain’t fun, but at least it was over quick for me.”

“Sure. I came damn close a few times.”

“You did. Closest with that cholera, no less.”

“Was that you there, for real? Or was that just me imagining it from the fever?” She’d never been certain.

He tilted his head aside, looking up towards the ridgeline, hands clasped in between his knees. “Does it matter, in the end? You needed me there, but you was feeling a stronger call to stay.”

She had, and she was fairly sure Arthur’s murmured pleas for her to keep fighting had been no fever delusion. “Jake…” She couldn’t help the feeling of guilt. She’d made her choice to live, and to love another man, and now here he was, knowing that.

She’d missed his laugh, rich and warm. “Don’t you be sorry. It’s--there’s so much we never got to do. Never will, now. But it don’t hurt for me like for you, knowing all them years and dreams we won’t be seeing together. Pain’s part of living, Sadie girl, but after? That’s peaceful. The love we had, that’s what I got still, and it’s a fine thing. But you should be happy. Have what you wanted. A good life. Kids. He can give you that.”

He’d opened that door, however slightly, by referring to Arthur. “So you been following my adventures, huh?”

He gave another low chuckle, looking down at his hands, shaking his head. “My God. You’re giving Grandma Rosie a world of consternation. Should have heard her cackling about you ending up staying in a convent like she was always threatening you when we was kids. Said it did you a world of good.”

“It did,” she said. “Funny enough. Not curbing my _wild ways_ or whatever. But it let me heal some things I needed. Nuns can be real decent folk.”

“Well, the one sure likes you.” He nodded to her hand. “You’re wearing her ring, even.”

She glanced down at it, the green stone catching the sunlight for a moment. “That’s Calderón’s?” She’d thought it strange that Arthur would have been reckless enough to go buy a ring without much more than a ghost of hope. But it made sense when Jake said it. Of course she’d have given it to Arthur. Probably with her own particular advice. “If she thought I was worth wearing this--then I’m honored.” She’d have to tell her that. She knew what it meant to pass on jewelry, particularly a wedding ring, and she’d held onto this for years, having no child of her own to give it to after her son died. The fact she gave it to Arthur, hoping he’d give it to her, said plenty about what esteem the woman who’d once been Beatriz, wife and mother, held them in. _We might need to name a daughter Beatrice, then._ “She’s been good to us both. Grandma Rosie must be thrilled a nun’s been straightening me out.”

“Sure. Though you living in a convent with an outlaw you was pretending was your husband? Should have heard her sighing and fussing. She probably ain’t sure _what_ to think even now.” He looked over at her, blue eyes twinkling with humor.

“Yeah, well, I was an outlaw myself, so ain’t like I’m some lily white gal saving him from himself. And if you’re all-knowing or whatever, you know nothing was going on.” She went right for it. She’d never needed to mince words with Jake, not since they were kids together. “And what are you thinking about all of it?” 

“You mean what do I think of him?” he challenged her right back. Read her so easily, and she admitted she’d missed that. Though to give Arthur his due, when it wasn’t situations where he feared he’d messed up and destroyed everything, he was fairly perceptive himself. That epitaph for Jake certainly proved it. She looked at him, unwilling to back down. “He’s a bunch of contradictions, that’s for damn sure. Caro calling him ‘Saint Bandit’ might be more on the nose than she thinks.”

“He’s trying,” she felt compelled to defend him. “He ain’t had good things like you and me did. Didn’t get to grow up happy and loved and knowing he was worthwhile. That takes its toll.” 

Jake held up a hand, palm up, in a gesture of peace. “No, I ain’t arguing. He’s a good man. But he still pulled in the wrong harness for a lot of years. That takes its toll.”

“I don’t know he’ll ever stop holding himself responsible.” She chewed her lip, trying to think how to put it. But it felt good to have someone to talk to about it. Strangely, things didn’t feel odd with Jake. It was like being back in their younger years, before the lens tilted just so and they looked at each other with that additional shine of romance, alongside all the love already there. She was talking to a lifelong best friend again, comfortable and familiar. The fierce fire of passion, all the longing and the agony of loss, had faded. It wasn’t gone, it was there in memory, but it had retreated a ways, and this steady glow that had always been there was what shone clearest now. “That ain’t bad. If knowing his mistakes makes him know who he wants to be, and why. But if he sticks to blaming himself? He hates himself for so damn much. He’s been hurt so damn much. It makes him...fragile. Like you never was. Sometimes I feel like I could break him without even trying. With something that would have been nothing much between you and me. And I don’t want to be one more person that makes him feel like he’s nothing.” 

She’d found she feared that. The rules she knew couldn’t necessarily apply, for how to be, how to fight. The two of them understood so much about each other with ease, but then something would come up where she’d have to try to put words to it, and that was no easy thing. But sometimes he needed that, and she’d have to try harder to be able, just like he’d have to work on it too. 

“He’s tough enough to get this far,” Jake said, leaning over and nudging her shoulder with his in a friendly gesture. “Give him some time. He’ll figure it out.” He gave her a broad, cheerful smile. “He’s got damn good incentive, after all. You was the best friend, the best wife, a man could have. Still are, for him. He’s a lucky man.”

That laid a gentle, soothing hand of comfort over another wound. She’d worried so much that Jake would have hated who she’d become, been repulsed. She nodded out towards a pair of deer grazing peacefully towards the entrance of the gulch. “It was one hell of a dream, wasn’t it?”

“It was. And thank you for coming back. Can’t have been easy. But now you gotta go live a new dream.” He raised an eyebrow. “And I’m glad you wrote Caro. Always knew losing her bothered you, so I never brought it up. But I didn’t know you had reason to feel guilty about it.” 

She found herself blushing, embarrassed. “Well, hope I fixed things there.”

He looked at her, eyes on hers, gone soft and gentle. “Glad you’re playing and singing again. I’m glad you’re happy again, really.”

“I miss you. I love him, I do, but I miss you.” She always would, and that was all right, it wasn’t all one or the other. 

“You’ll see me again someday. All of us, really.” He leaned over and hugged her tightly, kissing her on the cheek. “But you go live your life before that.” He got up, dusting off the knees of his pants in that way he’d had, and headed into the cabin, shutting the door behind him. She didn’t follow, knowing that she couldn’t. Instead, she got up herself, and started walking towards the entrance of the gulch, towards that new life ahead. She didn’t turn for one last glance at the quiet cabin nestled in the mountains. She didn’t need to look back. The best of it was in her mind and heart forever.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Sadie’s Journal**  
 **Lyrics and tune for “Amazing Grace”**  
Collection Notes: “Traditional hymn. Heard it all the time as a kid.”  
Personal Notes: “Jake’s favorite. It seemed a fitting farewell. He always believed in the best in people, in the world. I lost a lot of that, for the time. Seems that there is still a mighty grace to be found out there all the same, and in the unlikeliest of places and people. I will miss him, always. But I see there ain’t a need to fear that the good in me died along with him. There is still grace in me too, it’s just a thing transformed.”

 **Lyrics and tune for “Shenandoah”**  
Collection Notes: “Traditional riverboat song. Reminded of it by Arthur Griffith.”  
Personal Notes: “Given he seems to know the lyrics to most songs half at best, I doubt Arthur picked this one on purpose. But ‘Away, I’m bound away’ is fitting all the same. It’s the Montana we’ll cross, not the Missouri, but we have traveled far for this, and now we need to head for home and happier things. I’m lucky to have him along for it.” 

**Arthur’s Journal**  
**Sketch of Spider Gorge** , captioned “SPIDER GORGE. Came back up here with Sadie. Lots of memories, few of them good. I know myself for a better man than the one who came here last. I stopped running, from many things. I see the goodness in things and people that I didn’t, or didn’t let myself anyway. But there are so many ghosts here for both Sadie and me all the same. Be glad to never come back, if I am being honest. It unsettles me being here. Sleeping in Colter for the night I cannot help but look for the old gang again, even knowing they ain’t there. Though I swear I can hear their voices still if I listen close.”

 **Sketch of Jake’s marker, and Eliza and Isaac’s crosses** , captioned “So we both have faced things. Said our goodbyes as best we can. The dead never truly leave us, do they, but if you done it right, perhaps the memory is bittersweet rather than sheer pain. I ain’t gonna forget you, never. But what’s done is done. All I can do now is remember, and make the future better in their honor.”


	28. Chuparosa II: Happiness And Other Dreams

They took a slower pace heading homeward, and Sadie admitted to herself that she kept a careful eye on Arthur. He’d pushed his way up here all right, but then, the man had thrown himself into a train robbery, a shootout in Van Horn, and then that confrontation in Beaver Hollow, running all the way up a ridge and getting into a fistfight, and that right on the edge of dying. He’d gotten better at easing off, mostly because Felipe had lectured the hell out of him at Las Hermanas, but now that he was managing things himself, she suspected he still had little Goddamn sense about when to quit.

He looked OK, albeit a little tired, but she would hold the line on them taking shorter days to start. So they stopped near Cattail Pond that first night. Fished again, and hearing more of his stories about Hosea, sensing the warmth of memory rather than the worst pangs of grief, it made for a peaceful evening, sleeping out underneath the stars again. 

They stopped in Strawberry the next night, and two shorter days and ample rest did him a world of good, to her mind. He looked far better the next morning. Eyes brighter, movements brisker. She also woke before dawn, noting with some wry amusement that while he was still fast asleep, when he mumbled something and pressed closer to her in his sleep, she felt a nudge against her hip that told her one particular part of him was at least half-awake. It was no remarkable thing, and she wouldn’t mention it. Knowing Arthur, he’d be embarrassed. Probably had only hoped that she wouldn’t notice when they’d been sharing a bed and been so careful of giving each other space. But she’d shared a bed with Jake long enough to know that happened to men sometimes in their sleep. Usually had more to do with needing to take a piss than anything, from what he’d said. Though sometimes it meant waking up, rolling over, and reaching for Jake, slowly making love to start the day, both of them caught in that dreamy state of the last wisps of sleep.

Not just yet for her and Arthur, and she wanted them both well awake for it when they got to it. But it reminded her that they would be home soon, so she’d best be prepared for that. Stopping in the general store for a few more things, bidding Chip farewell once again, she made certain to add two last necessary items to the order. Vinegar was ordinary enough to cause no notice anyway. As to the other, given some prudish asshole in Washington, nobody could say or sell that kind of thing openly. But Chip and other shopkeepers had to understand exactly what the Wheeler and Rawson catalogue was selling with that particular little netted and cup shaped “sponge for women’s uses” with its attached silk ribbon and neat carrying tin, and those “women’s uses” sure as shit didn’t include bathing or doing the dishes.

Heading south again, crossing the Upper Montana, they passed from the lush forests back to the grasslands of Great Plains. Skirting well wide of Blackwater still, they made for the New Austin border. Just on the southern side of the Lower Montana, stopping for a break to rest the horses and themselves, they caught a surprise at someone hailing them. Her hand automatically went to the butt of her revolver, and she could sense Arthur equally tense and ready. Bob and Buell were out of earshot, and unsaddled for the break as usual, but they could be summoned at a whistle.

The man got off his horse, holding his hands up, saying with almost excessive joviality, “Now, I’m not looking for no trouble. Mind if I sit a spell with you?”

Arthur glanced at her, and shrugged. “Sure,” she said.

Their new guest immediately helped himself to the contents of the coffee pot, and reached out with his knife and speared a piece from the open can of pineapple, and that set her teeth on edge. Hadn’t asked about that, and either he was rude as hell, or he was looking to piss them off. 

Arthur let out a quick snort of amusement. “Oh, it’s like that? Then say what you come here to say, mister.” He sat down across the fire from the man, eyeing him directly with a level stare. She sat down too, not quite sure what was going on, but obviously Arthur had judged it the latter case--the man was here to piss them off.

“There’s no cause for that, buddy. See, I’d like us to be friends.” He looked about forty, sturdily built, with dark hair, a mustache, and bushy mutton chops. Bit of a flashy dresser, with a fancy hat and a gold silk cravat.

“That would depend upon the terms of the friendship,” she told him dryly. “Who the hell are you, anyway?”

“James Langton. I’m in the bounty business myself.” He finished eating the pineapple, wiping the knife on his handkerchief, and tucking it back into its sheath at his side. “And I heard from folk that a woman dragged Buzzard Byrd into Blackwater a few weeks back. Guessing that’s you, miss.” He nodded to Sadie. “Heard then that a man and a woman confronted him on the train just north of Manteca Falls, and well, by your descriptions, seems I’ve found the pair?”

She didn’t like that the man had apparently got word of them passing through on the way up to Ambarino, and had watched for their return. Made her think of a snake, patiently lying in wait. “So what of it?” Arthur asked, voice politely even, but she could see a careful tension in the set of his body, ready to fight if need be. “You sour that you got beat to the score?”

“I think you misunderstand the situation and whose turf you’re on.”

Arthur let out a slow, low chuckle, turned to her. Said in Welsh, “Looks like he’s paying us a social call.”

It took her a second, then she placed the joke. The kind of social call Dutch had his enforcer pay to rival gangs. “We need to fight this one out?” she asked him.

“No, not just yet. But stay cool. He’s looking for us to either back down or get pushed into a fight.”

She eyed him, raising an eyebrow. “Oh, sure, women don’t know _nothing_ about keeping their mouth shut so they don’t piss a man off.”

He made a sort of dipping shrug and smile that acknowledged the truth of that humbly enough. “Sure.” 

“It’s rude to be talking around a man, you know,” Langton said, looking at the two of them. “What kind of gibberish is that anyway? This is America. We speak English here.”

“It’s rude to invite yourself to someone’s fire and start throwing your weight around, and yet here we are,” Arthur told him. “So by all means. Say your piece.” Kept his words friendly, even warm in tone, watching Langton carefully.

“Very well. New Austin’s _my_ territory, friends. I don’t take kindly to folk thinking they can come swooping in and doing as they damn well please.” He leaned in, staring at the two of them. A hard man at first glance, though she suspected like most hard men, there was that rotten, cowardly center. A secure man didn’t need to throw his weight around like this, like a bad actor.

“Mmhm,” Arthur acknowledged, with a slight nod. “See, the way it looks to me, there’s plenty of scores for a bounty hunter in New Austin. Place is a damn mess. All them Del Lobos. Marshal Johnson, he’s a bit overwhelmed.”

“Didn’t see no brand of ownership on Mr. Byrd neither,” she pointed out.

“I’d sooner you fuck off back to Mexico, the both of you. Plenty of Del Lobos there, from what I hear. And what, now you’re expanding up into West Elizabeth too?”

“But we gotta pay the bills somehow,” Sadie told him. “Looks like you could use some help up here. It’s an awful lot for one man, ain’t it? Must have been hard trying to do it all yourself with all sorts of unsavory types coming in.” She put a tone of sympathy and compassion into her words, looking at Langton with wide eyes. Practically batting her eyelashes. Sounding like butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth. “And after all, ain’t we both on the same side, sir? Taking out criminal sorts and making things safer for good, decent folk. No cause for a fight between us, friend. We’re all fighting for the same thing.”

She heard a strangled laugh from Arthur beside her, resisting the urge to elbow him in the ribs. He’d had his part to play, and she’d damn well play hers. If it had been just her she’d likely have needed to play the rawhide tough sort who didn’t give a damn what a man thought, but she enjoyed the fleeting confusion and annoyance on Langton’s face at her playing sweet as sugar to cover the spun steel beneath. Arthur advised not fighting. What he didn’t have, what a woman could do, was disarming this jackass in a completely different way, and she enjoyed the hell out of Langton realizing he’d just lost all his weapons. Knowing she wasn’t stupid, knowing she wasn’t apologizing one bit for Byrd and fully intended to hunt other bounties in New Austin, but giving him no way to provoke her. That much sticky sweetness was like stepping into a pool of taffy, helplessly holding him there.

“She do the talking for you, boy?” Langton tried, looking over at Arthur. 

He shrugged, kept his tone utterly polite. “Seems my wife said what needs to be said. Plenty of bounties in New Austin for the time being. Marshal Johnson especially said he was grateful for the assistance we rendered in Armadillo during the cholera, the town being so vulnerable and all with the sheriff leaving. So here’s wishing good hunting to you, Mr. Langton. We'll head off back to Mexico soon enough, never you fear, but we'll be back to keep helping out.”

Watching Langton ride off, a bounty on his horse’s back and presumably bound for Blackwater, she asked Arthur, “What was that about Marshal Johnson?”

“Oh, that? Warning him that if he was thinking of taking out the competition, it’s gonna get noticed.” He laughed, shaking his head, looking out as Langton disappeared from view into the distance. “I swear, if that fella don’t remind me of Angelo Bronte. Big boss-man trying to be God and throw his weight around.” He glanced up, and his eyes met hers. “Or Dutch, I reckon.”

She nodded at that, unable to do much else than acknowledge the truth of that, painful as it still was for him, and likely always would be. “Come on. Ain’t that much further to MacFarlane’s. We should at least say howdy.”

Riding into the yard and seeing Bonnie and Gus at work in the paddock with the horses, she smiled to see the younger woman waving excitedly as she recognized them. They ended up staying three days, helping with the spring lambing. Hard work in fits and starts, but better than the long grind of the journey to Ambarino and back, so despite the effort, she felt better rested by the end of it all the same. Those were good days. Riding out with Bonnie to help find the stragglers, seeing the love that she had for the ranch, shining pure and clear. Helping Amos with the difficult births, watching one spotted ewe happily curled up with her two new lambs. Hearing Arthur coax another ewe with soft words and careful hands. Seeing that shy, proud grin cross his face for a moment, surveying the end of the work, wiping his forehead with the back of his arm. The same look she’d seen on Jake’s face up in Ambarino--discovering the joy of building or bringing something into the world. _You’ll fight for folk still, but you never was made for stealing._

Relaxing in a good, hot bath and letting it take away the travel grime and the aches. Spending time with the stock, with the MacFarlanes, in a quiet sort of peace. Drew paid them for the work, insisting on it as usual, asking, “You interested in work, starting next February? Can’t take on no more full-time hands, but I can always use spring and summer folk through May or June. You’re good workers. And Bonnie, well...my girl likes you, of course. Knew she would.”

She looked over at Arthur, saw him looking at Drew with a look of uncertainty. “We’re kinda tied to me being in Chuparosa every two weeks for the next couple years still, seeing my doctor about the TB,” he said carefully. “I….it’s real good of you to offer, sir. Drew,” he amended, seeing the older man’s pointed look. “But not sure it’s fair to hire on a man who has to take a day or two off that regular.”

“Well, you two think about it anyway,” he said. “I’m sure you’ll pass through before then. We can talk about it.”

She couldn’t help but think about it as they rode out. It was an enticing idea in some ways. Being near more people, being so close to the land, the stock, the quiet life they wanted to eventually live. Almost like the past two years hadn’t happened for her, and she could turn back to Sadie the farmer. But that other pull was there too, the need to do what good she could, to help balance the scales for the evil she’d done and enabled, to help try to protect good people by hunting down the bad ones. “It’s a good offer,” she said finally.

“I know. And maybe we think about it some.”

“It might be good in the future. Especially since next spring, we might be looking at us having a kid right about then too.” If things went well, anyway, and she didn’t want to hope too soon or too hard, but it was so damn tough to not hope when it seemed like that dream was so close now.

“Hopefully not out in a pasture,” he joked. 

“Very funny. But something more settled would be good for that. Otherwise, I’m not able to do much, and you trying to stitch together enough odd jobs is gonna be tough. No bounty hunting without me. Remember? We agreed. We do it together, or not at all. I ain’t letting you ride off alone to go chase down a bad man. Not ever again.” He’d better not expect her to endure that. After Bluestone Ridge, she couldn’t, and especially not now that he meant so much more to her than before.

“Sure. I know what we agreed, and I’ll figure something out for then. Just can’t help but feel I ain’t earned that kind of life. Not just yet. There’s more to do first in making up for what I done.”

She held back from asking if he ever would, because she did understand the feeling. “Maybe. Though it ain’t like we can do it full time. You heard him. Three, maybe four months of the year when they’re real busy.” Though she had to admit she might be a wild card in that notion. She couldn’t exactly put in a full days’ work as a ranch hand while pregnant or nursing a helpless newborn. “And I think it’d do you some good to have some ranch work. Keeps you remembering what you want.” Seeing him content with it as he’d been, she couldn’t help but want that for him even more. 

The corner of his mouth turned up a little more, into something self-conscious. “Just ain’t used to having choices. But no fears on me forgetting what it is I want.” He smiled at her more openly then, the self-consciousness fading. “I got you right here.”

Riding out into the desert, they stopped again shortly after noon on the shores of Lake Don Julio for a few hours to wait out the worst of the day’s fierce heat, and to rest Bob and Buell. The horses had a long journey of it too, and when she took off Bob’s saddle and blanket for the break, feeding him a sugar cube as a treat, he gave a low whicker of gratitude, trotting off after Buell. 

Arthur put down a blanket for them near the lakeshore against the heat of the sand and rock, and in his usual fashion, lay down, tipping his hat over his eyes against the sun, and was out immediately like a blown-out lantern. She expected he’d had to catch what bits of sleep he could whenever and wherever possible, probably going back to when he was a boy living on the streets, and that still hadn’t worn off. She still couldn’t help but envy him the ability somewhat. 

She couldn’t sleep herself, thinking too many thoughts, even watching the peaceful lakeshore as she was. Having finally let go of the past, as best she could, there was the future ahead. Tonight back at their home and fully intent on doing more in that bed than sleeping, being married next week, whatever came next spring and beyond. But she couldn’t help but feel content. It would be a good life. They’d make it one.

Pulling off her boots and socks, rolling up the legs of her pants, she waded out carefully into the shallows, feeling the caress of the water against her feet and legs. Breathed out a small sigh of relief at the soothing feel of it, even with as warm as the water was. Though it was so damn hot that some part of her wanted to do nothing more than just sit down in that water and soak herself all over. 

“You wanna go swim?” She looked back over her shoulder to see Arthur sitting up, hat put beside him, watching her.

She sighed, stepping back out of the water. “Told you I ain’t never learned.”

“Told you I would teach you.” He had, last year when they’d gone fishing on the San Luis, though he didn’t mention he’d made that promise if he stayed alive that long. Sometimes it still amazed her looking at him now how tenuous his hold on life had been a year ago. He gestured towards the lake. “Better place for it here than the river. Besides, it’s your birthday tomorrow. Call it an early present.”

He’d remembered that, and something within her went soft and warm hearing it. She almost made a wisecrack that she’d fully planned on getting her early birthday present tonight, but then wondered if this particular offer was about more than swimming. He might not be the most experienced of lovers, but he was a grown man with clear desires, so he wasn’t stupid or naive. He must know exactly what door he was carefully opening right now. Why not? The way he’d looked at her the past few days, she sensed he’d been of a like mind to her, the undercurrent of restraint, especially the last couple of nights at Drew’s ranch. It would have been tonight anyway, and she’d always wanted to learn to swim. Couldn’t help but be a bit surprised by that sudden show of boldness from him, though. Little as he thought of himself, she’d vaguely wondered if she’d need to coax him to leave a lantern lit in the bedroom, not him offering in broad daylight like this. “Well, why not?”

Though he tilted his head aside ever so slightly, adding with a delicate sort of care, “Lady’s choice, then--strip down or skivvies.”

She almost laughed, oddly touched. Still a gentleman in spite of himself, wanting to be sure this was what she wanted. “You really that afraid for my modesty?”

He gave a slight shrug, hands spread. “Well, no worries on mine. You already seen I ain’t much to look at.” She forbore from mentioning he’d stripped her down during the cholera too. Suspected he’d done his utmost to not really look, just as she had in Wapiti, but despite that, it was impossible to not see some things. Felt so long ago now, though just under a year and a half, and so much had changed since. 

She deliberately undid the knot of her kerchief, feeling his eyes on her. “Then I say no point in getting clothes wet.” 

Gentleman indeed, as he didn’t stare while she undressed, and she tried to return the favor, though she couldn’t help turning for a few peeks. But there would be time enough for that soon. He rushed through it anyway, brisk and efficient, rather than doing it slowly as he would have had he wanted to catch her eye and keep her watching. She couldn’t help a small smile at that. All right, so either he was flustered as hell, or he had some things to learn, or both. She’d tried to give him a show and he hadn’t taken it, so she dealt with her own clothes, then discreetly dealing with soaking that sponge in vinegar and putting it in. No, they might not need it, but chances were they would, and she’d as soon not have to pause things for that. Then she followed him into the water. Oddly touched that he could have stared at her again, but instead he kept his eyes on her face--well, mostly. One quick glance down at her breasts as she waded into the water beside him, and an almost guilty look of apology as he forced his eyes back up again almost immediately. She managed to not laugh because he might take it the wrong way. But in her mind, good to see he couldn’t quite help himself.

The water felt good against her skin, a gentle and cooling caress, and she followed him out further, relieved to feel the rocky bottom of the lake stay stable beneath her feet, even as it sloped. Out to where the water came up to her shoulders, and then he stopped. “Found a drop off,” he noted dryly. “We’ll stick here for now, all right?” She nodded at that, eyeing past him, the surface of the lake deceptively calm and covering up the depths that could swallow her up. 

Not surprisingly, he took the offer to teach her seriously. Stark naked, both of them, and with the excuse to get his hands on her shamelessly and claim it was all in the interest of instruction, but he didn’t. He took her hands in his, let her kick her feet up from the bottom, getting used to the strange feeling of being suspended, feeling the momentary instinctive fear of falling from being rootless and letting it pass. She found she enjoyed that feeling of that strange dreamy weightlessness, as if her body and all Sadie Adler’s cares washed away, leaving only some sleek, fey water creature. Like the selkies Grandma Rosie had talked about, perhaps, or the kelpie. She’d always liked the fierce kelpie protecting its home more than the poor hapless selkies, made slaves by their stolen skins. 

Arthur caught her by the waist next, hands still sure but gentle, a stable brace, though the contact of his fingers against her bare skin sent a small shock through her body, sensation rising within her in spite of herself. From how he cleared his throat, she thought he wasn’t unaffected either. She had the wicked thought that she could certainly “accidentally” bump him and tease him by it, brush up against him and linger at it after that, but no, not just yet. Showing her how to kick her feet, then how to move her arms, he helped her turning floating into actual swimming. Teasing her here and there, easing her fears, and they ended up splashing each other in a big water fight because of it, laughing like a pair of kids, and God, it all felt so good. 

Eventually, she swam, really and truly, and the thrill that ran through her at going past that drop off, knowing she’d faced that risk and won, felt like a victory. He swam right near her, probably so she could grab his arm and be towed back to safety if need be, but she kept at it, loving the feeling of freedom, the silken slide of the water over her skin. By her side Arthur laughed, the sound deep and warm and carefree, saying, “Looks like we’ll make a proper mermaid of you yet.”

Mermaids--two faces of the same coin there too, by the tales. Luring some men in with their songs to their doom, but they saved drowning people too. Like kelpies, they were able to choose, to help or to hurt, and seeing and judging which men deserved which face, which fate. No wonder most men didn’t understand that, needing them to be all one thing or another, the sweet savior or the vicious bitch. Women could understood mermaids, because both facets lay beneath the surface of every woman’s skin. She’d already made her choice with this man. He’d saved her, he’d helped her, and then she’d been lucky enough to make an impulsive choice that saved him. Not from drowning, but he would have died fighting for air, and that felt akin enough. Hearing him cough and gasp, watching his exhausted struggles, had been like watching him drown on dry land. They’d saved each other and that bound them together inextricably in some way. But loving him, that was a choice, and it was one she’d make again and again, without regret.

Something shifted within, the fear fading further and further into the background. She swam back to the drop, feeling the rock ledge under her feet again as she stood there. Untied the thong holding her braid, combing it out with her fingers, letting her hair fall down over her shoulders. All the pictures she’d seen of mermaids, their hair was loose and flowing, all wanton and proud. A man wasn’t supposed to see a grown woman’s hair down except for his wife. She’d flaunted that social stricture at Clemens Point and Shady Belle, making it undeniable with her loose hair and pants that she was both a woman and a fighter, and the surge of strength she’d had crackling through her at that, after feeling so broken and powerless, felt too good. She felt that sense of power coursing through her again, but power of a different sort, but still a kind she’d thought stolen at the hands of some bastard O’Driscolls.

There he was, a few feet away, having swum in to see what she was doing. She’d lured him in without even a song, but Arthur stood there now, watching her with care. She could see the desire there, but mostly, what filled his eyes was the longing, the wary sense of hope after so long left forlorn. She held her hands out to him, palms up, like he had to her an hour or two before, asking for that trust that she wouldn’t let him drown. 

“You sure?” he asked, gaze locked with hers, voice gone all soft.

She stepped closer, hands sliding down his forearms, catching his hands in hers. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

He held on tight to her hands. “You got plenty of cause to be scared, I reckon.”

She did. If it had been Jake, this would have been so much easier, familiar as he’d been to her. She’d have known exactly what to expect from him, how to tell him if he needed to ease off, or not do something. She also wouldn’t have kept it all inside her for nearly two years, at that. But Arthur was worth tearing down those sharp, thorny barriers she’d built for her own safety. “Sure. I’m scared. You’re scared.” She could see it now, sensed it with a deep certainty. No, it wasn’t simply gentlemanly reticence. He’d been barely touched, loved so little, and then suffered his share of brutality and shame himself courtesy of Colm. He'd never known how good it should be. Opening himself up to her had to be no easy thing either. In some ways, it made it easier to see that he was nervous and frightened too. 

His eyes met hers, a flare of anxiousness there along with the gentleness. “I don’t want you to have to be afraid of me.” She silently read its counterpart there: _I don’t want to be the one who makes you afraid._ He took in a deep breath. “But my God, I do want you.” He brought their joined hands up to his lips, pressing a kiss softly to the back of her hand. “So I figure this is how it goes. You tell me. What you need. Anything you don’t like, or you want me to stop, or I’m making an ass of myself…you just...say something.”

He’d effectively handed her the reins if she needed it that way, heart aching even more at the realization, the love he showed by that. Most men wouldn’t, couldn’t, too afraid to not be entirely in control. He had his own fears. But for her, he’d risk it. That said plenty. 

Wading back towards shore, keeping hold of his hand, she paused after they stepped out of the water. Turned back to him, seeing him hesitate, brow knitting in confusion or worry. “Something wrong?” 

She shook her head. “No. Just…I want to look at you.” She’d only seen him undressed before the once at Wapiti, and that only at a glance, and not deliberately looking anyway. There seemed little enough of that pale, frail, badly beaten, and barely living man she and Charles had so carefully tucked under the bison robe in the man before her now, alive and mostly healthy again, but she could never entirely forget that day, the terror and determination and the feeblest flickers of hope. But she needed so much to look at him now, to see him alive and well and real, and chase away that lingering ghost. Had the thought to add a quiet, “Please.” She could see the instinctive flex of his fingers, his arms, wanting to cover up or turn away or both. But he didn’t, arms dropping back down to his sides, letting her look.

She could look at him almost endlessly, truth be told, especially like this. Lit by the bright desert sun out in the wilds, far away from civilization. Taking in the sight of him, beautifully made, the broad shoulders and chest, the lean hips, the strong thighs, and noticing with a smile that yes, he very obviously definitely did want her. Though when her eyes drifted back up to his face, she saw his awkwardly downcast eyes and then his careful glance up at her with something like painful apology there, the high burn of color in his cheeks. Seemingly enduring it only because she’d asked, expecting she'd find fault, rather than proudly letting her look her fill, and she cursed herself for a fool there. She knew what a damn hard time he had saying “no” to someone he loved. How many times had she heard him make some self-deprecating comment, even today? _You already seen I ain’t much to look at._

“You’re wrong, you know.” She wasn’t good with words. Jake hadn’t much needed them. But she was coming to see that maybe Arthur did, so she’d have to struggle her way into managing it. “You’re a hell of a lot to look at. And believe me, I like what I see.”

He gave off a soft snort at that, though she saw the faint, momentary smile that brought, gone in an instant like the last wisps of a dream on waking, but real all the same. “Can I…” No, she rethought how she wanted to say that. He likely wouldn’t refuse her anything, for fear of her turning away. “You want me to touch you?”

“Yeah.” He said it lowly, not quite meeting her eyes again, but she heard the certainty in it regardless.

It seemed like he’d shown her the key here. “Like you said. Anything you don’t like, you tell me.” She stepped in, now catching his gaze with hers deliberately, making sure he listened to this. “I don’t want you just putting up with nothing. I want you enjoying it, all right? How it’s supposed to be.” 

He gave her a brief nod at that, but he kept his eyes on hers as he did it. She reached up, brushing a lock of wet hair away from his face, smoothing her thumb down the ridge of one high cheekbone. Stretched up to kiss him then, feeling that thrum of power right alongside the tingle of pleasure, crackling through her like lightning. That rising desire to be touched, and soon, spilling out from where she’d kept it caged up, warring with the last of the fear. Not so strange after all. This was Arthur. She knew him, heart and soul. Learning him like this was one more piece of the whole, that was all.

So she kissed him, touched him, slowly learning him by sight and feel. Licking the water from his skin at the hollow of his throat and feeling his pulse jump in response. Hearing the low rumble he made that sounded like pleasure at her running her fingers through his hair. Touching the mark on his shoulder, the one from the O’Driscolls’ shotgun, a large starburst swath of scar slowly fading to white. Men went on about women’s obvious curves, but she’d always thought men had their curves too. She found them here in the turn of muscle, the way one flowed into another easily beneath her hands sliding over his wet skin, grace along with the power. Strong and sturdy, a joy to look at and touch, and not much soft about him except that good and kind heart. 

She leaned down, brushing her lips across the tiny stippled scars on his sides from his sessions with the Cactus. Every two weeks, he patiently trudged into that room at Las Hermanas prepared for more pain, more exhaustion, expecting to suffer again in the hopes it chased the TB off a little further. Maybe as a woman she understood some of that, given the monthly misery she went through at her bleeding time. But they were the only readily visible sign of the disease he kept fighting even now. The rest was all within. His scarred lungs, yes, how he still got tired more easily, and she could sometimes hear a faint rasp in a breath or two, especially when she lay close to him in bed. But mostly it had changed his soul irrevocably too, into this man she loved. She only wished that he could have been that man in a way where life had been so much gentler to him. So she tried to put as much of that kindness and care as she could into the way she touched him, and it wasn’t much against so many years lacking, but maybe it would help.

There was a tension coiling in him that she could feel, and not the litheness of gathering pleasure either. That made her pause, straightening, looking up to see if she could read him. His closed eyes kept her from some of that, but that fact itself, and the stiff shoulders, said enough. Had that been too much, left him feeling too exposed? “Arthur?” 

He opened his eyes, and there was something there in them, some mix of emotions she couldn’t quite figure out, but the bright shine there stood clearly enough. It wasn’t only water dripping from his still-wet hair on his cheeks. The fear gripped her for a moment--how was she supposed to handle this? She’d pushed too hard, hurt him without realizing it, like she’d been so afraid she would. She let go, stepped back. “Didn’t mean to upset you, I’m sor--”

He surprised her then by how he reached for her, pulling her in tight, the startling sudden shock of skin on skin with nothing between them, the press of his arousal hard against her belly, the fierce kiss he gave her, an embrace that was all heat and need and strength unleashed. So much, almost too much, and he broke off the kiss after a few moments, his grip on her easing. His voice in her ear was rough and low, words coming in a rush. “No. No need for apologizing. It ain’t...you didn’t hurt me.”

So that was it. Not pain or fear, but something too big to be contained after breaking open the cage of where he’d kept it locked up for so many years. “It’s all right. Ain’t nothing strange about that. It’s been a long time for you,” she said softly, the hand on his back rubbing idly between his shoulder blades. She’d cried too, that night she and Jake finally agreed to leave, then went upstairs to her room, letting themselves have what they’d desperately wanted between them for eight years. Keeping it all suppressed that long, and then finally having something so longed for, after years of waiting--yes, she could understand that. It felt like a burst dam, feeling too much all at once, needing to let it out.

He squeezed her tightly again for a moment, then eased off on the embrace, keeping close to her all the same. Reaching up, brushing the hair from her eyes, hands cupping her face, green eyes searching hers. “All my life,” voice once again gone calm and steady, and now she was the one about to cry, just from those words, and what he’d said by them. Realizing what a gift it felt like to know she’d touched him, not just on his skin but on his very soul, in a way that nobody else ever had, and tell him by it that he was worth that kind of tenderness and love. Showing him that she looked at him and found him beautiful, inside and out. He’d let her inside that wall he’d built so long ago, let her truly see him, and she’d cherish that trust. He kissed her again, lightly. “You want me to touch you?” he asked.

It hit her that maybe it would have been easier to do this tipsy, or just in a frenzy of feeling one night. Slow and deliberate as this was, she felt exposed, raw, vulnerable. No wonder he’d felt off-kilter himself. But he’d been brave enough to risk it, and she did want him, wanted this. “Yeah.” Passion between them would be no problem. They’d seen that with that kiss as Las Hermanas, and that quick blaze just now when he’d kissed her, struggling with both emotions and words. But they’d been out in the cold and dark for so long, afraid and alone. Maybe what they needed right now wasn’t to throw themselves into the raging heat of wildfire, but instead to coax a steady, deliberate warmth. 

He smiled slightly, one hand sliding down and resting on her hip. “Might be easier if you was lying down?” He nodded over towards the blanket. Stretching out there as he asked, she waited as he sat down beside her, taking his own chance to look at her thoroughly. She resisted her own momentary urge to cover up, because that belonged to the O’Driscolls. This was no cause for shame. She was with a man she loved, and he wanted to be here, not looking on her as something ruined, filthy, and broken. He looked at her with something like awe on his face, as though he could hardly believe she was real. “You’re one fine sight, you know that?” 

He touched her like that to start, too softly as he he feared she might disappear, just the barest ghosting slide of his fingertips on her skin. She was on the verge of telling him she wasn’t so breakable as that, but he seemed to realize it, and one hand cupped her breast as he kissed her again, still sweet but not hesitant.

There was still a brief hitch here and there, but it felt like him remembering something long left neglected and half-forgotten, not backing off from fear for her. It eased her with him finding that balance, not so rough as to be a bad reminder, but not so tentative that it made her feel he saw her as something frail. The touches, the soft rasp of his beard against her skin as he nuzzled her, the kisses, the gentleness and reverence in him, felt like that drew that numbed part of her soul back to life, making her whole again. 

So by the time he stroked her thighs, coaxing them apart, she went along without fear. Though his eyebrows shot up, eyes suddenly full of confusion. “Sadie, is that a, um, ribbon hanging out of your--”

Some wicked spark in her made her prop herself up on her elbows, grinning at him, deciding to tease him. “Figured I should decorate for the occasion. Read in a lady’s magazine that you should spruce up your pussy with a ribbon before having company.”

The look of consternation on his face was priceless, obviously not sure whether he meant to laugh or worry he was the butt of a joke here. “Can’t say I’ve read a lady’s magazine, but I’m thinking they meant the other kind of pussy.”

Letting him off the hook, she explained, “It’s tied to a sponge, so I can get it out again easy. Keeps us from having to worry about a little surprise nine months down the road.”

He nodded at that, a slight look of relief on his face. “I’d wondered how you was handling that.” Though the corner of his mouth curled up in that smile she knew full well came before some wisecrack. “Though I never saw you as a pale pink ribbon kind of gal.”

“True. I probably should replace it with it a blue one.”

“What, for first place?” 

“Damn straight.” She couldn’t help but laugh, and he leaned down and kissed her again, and she could feel the laughter in him as well. She’d missed that so much too, what it had been like to laugh with a man like this. 

Missed also what it felt like to have the touch of a hand other than her own easing that needy feeling between her thighs, and as much as he liked to claim he was stupid she knew him for a good observer and a fast learner. He proved that once again, obviously more than passingly familiar with this and surprisingly deft at it once he got going, fingers stroking within and thumb stroking without, saying half to himself, “That’s it, huh?” once he found just the right way for her, her feeling the growing confidence in it. Doing it until she arched into it and cried out, all at once relieved by the good feeling of it but left with the ache to have him closer yet, to feel more than his fingers inside of her. 

Lying there on the blanket beside him, feeling the lingering aftershocks and catching her breath and letting her heart slow, the warmth of the sun on her skin, she opened her eyes and glanced over at him. He reached out, tracing a line from her throat down between her collarbones, her breasts, just the lightest brush of a fingertip, giving her a bit of a grin. “Gotta admit I did wonder exactly how far them freckles went. Guess I know now.”

“Didn’t take the chance to find out in Armadillo?”

“Had other things on my mind. Besides, it wouldn’t have been fitting to stare, you caught up in the fever as you was.”

She laughed. “Ain't you the honorable one.” 

He gave a comfortable sounding scoff. “You saying you was eyeing me in Wapiti?”

“No. Not really looking, but couldn't help seeing a bit, you know? Different from staring.” He nodded in acknowledgment of that. She reached out and playfully pushed against his arm. “Speaking of you being a gentleman, you did say ladies should come first, but...” She trailed her hand up along the length of his thigh, feeling the strength there from all those years on horseback, and nearly reached up further, but then stopped. Fun and teasing could come later, and they’d gotten a good start on it, but right now, she needed nothing more than him, no more waiting. “I want you, OK?” It seemed important he should hear that again. 

Getting up on her knees, she caught his eyes with hers, caught his hand in hers, coaxing him to sit up too. Straddling his hips, taking his cock in her hand, she felt his hips instinctively rolling into her touch, hearing the small, soft noise he made at it, which turned into a deeper groan as she guided him into her. Moving down slowly onto him, for a moment fighting an instinctive tension, her body protesting the feeling, the memories of it. Arthur’s hand on her back, rubbing in a small soothing caress, a soft murmur of “Easy, sweetheart, you’re all right.” Trying to not close her eyes, because she was watching his face, his eyes, the green of them gone dark like deep waters, looking at her with love and desire both. Telling herself this was a man she loved, that he wouldn’t hurt her. Believing it with a bone-deep certainty, instincts and her body finally easing, sinking down further and relaxing against him, letting out a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. Letting him wrap his arms around her and draw her in against him, holding him tightly in turn, her cheek pressed against his, one of his hands carding idly through her hair. 

She wasn’t sure how long they stayed like that, but it didn’t matter. She could have stayed forever in that moment. It seemed like he felt the same, neither of them in a hurry. When they did break off from that, it was only for small rolls of her hips, barely moving against him, and taking the chance for more kissing, more touching, as if trying to make up for everything held within for so long. Watching the look on his face, the dazed and joyful wonder at feeling all of this, finally knowing loving and being loved. Glad that it was her that gave that to him, feeling the strength in healing something so long wounded within him even as he helped her with her own scars.

But she felt him trembling, saw the clench of his jaw and the way his eyes half-closed, and then she understood it. It had been so long for him, and so little before that, and overwhelmed by all of this, he was fighting giving in to it. She wasn’t sure whether it was a sudden spike of the old fear and guilt saying he shouldn't feel anything this fine, or the notion that he had to hang on until he satisfied her again, or maybe both. He’d learn soon enough. There would be other times, and if anyone deserved this, he did. She leaned in, touched her forehead to his, whispering, “It’s all right, honey. Let go. Just...let go.” She moved against him harder then, more decisively, and something in him listened to her and slipped the restraint, because he thrust back up against her the next time, and she bit back a moan herself at the feeling of that, seeing sparks for a moment, hands tightening on his shoulders. 

It didn’t take long after that for him, feeling him shudder in her arms, hearing that low sound that she was sure was her name, then that gave way to the quiet aftermath. Lifting her head, she saw him do the same, him focusing on her. The soft delight in his eyes faded, and as she watched, a familiar expression tried to take its place, worried and wary. The way he looked at her, she could almost hear the words, though he didn’t say them. _Well, you’ve had me. Ain’t quite sure what you’ll do with me now?_

She breathed in slowly, deeply, chasing away the pang of pain that he should even have to start to doubt after what they’d just shared, while they were still joined together, holding on to each other, as close as two people could be. But she could see it in his eyes, feel it in the slight tension in his body. Fearing already that he’d proved a disappointment in this, waiting to hear her judge if he’d done well enough to justify her keeping him around, braced for criticism or outright rejection. She didn’t know what it was like, living with every happiness so easily crushed by a harsh word. She also couldn’t exactly yell at him that he needed to think better of her, because it wasn’t her. _It’s not you he doubts. It’s him. It always is._ She’d only have to believe that here, like most everywhere else, he’d come around once he saw and could believe that this was real, that it was steady, that her loving him didn’t depend on whether he failed at something or pissed her off that day. She willed him to believe better of himself, knowing that he’d get there. “If you apologize, Arthur, I swear I’m throwing you in the lake. You got nothing to be sorry for here.”

He blinked, and the guardedness in him faded. The look in his eyes now, that sparkle of delighted hope and almost unbridled joy that she’d caused in him--oh, she thought she’d remember that for the rest of her life. _You’re one fine man. And you’re mine, you’re mine. Can’t hardly believe that._ “All right then.” He kissed her, gentle as anything, then again and again, painting her face with small kisses. She’d never thought she’d have anything like this again, never thought she’d deserve it after all she’d been through and done. So maybe he wasn’t the only one struggling with those feelings of guilt, but maybe he’d help her believe it in the end too. 

She climbed off him then, getting some water for the two of them to clean up. Then she lay down beside him, tucking in against his side, head on his shoulder. He put an arm around her, kissed the top of her head lightly. No need for words for a little while, lying there underneath the desert sun, content as anything. “Should we still head home?” he ventured a while later, cutting through the pleasant haze of half-sleep.

She thought about it for a moment, pushing up slightly. Their bed was tempting, true, but as long as they’d dawdled now, by the time they got cleaned up and dressed again, got Bob and Buell back and resaddled, they’d make it to Chuparosa after dark. She was in no mood to ride from Ramita de la Baya in darkness, hoping they didn’t run into Del Lobos or anything else, not on what had turned into a truly fine day. She settled back down against him, putting a hand on his chest. “No. We’ll stick around till morning. Wouldn’t mind going for another swim.” She had the thought of swimming under the stars, and making love with him again by starlight and fireglow, and couldn’t help but smile at it. “Real fine birthday present.”

“Glad you liked it,” he murmured, and when she glanced up, she saw he was smiling too.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Sadie’s Journal**  
Song of Solomon 2:16.

My beloved is mine and I am his. 

**Arthur’s Journal**  
For years I thought John was the luckiest man alive. 

Turns out I am.

( **Sketch of “A+S”, surrounded by a heart** )


	29. Chuparosa II: Marriage, For Beginners

At first he had been surprised at how things didn’t radically alter simply because something within him had finally shifted its axis and tipped everything into balance. It seemed funny in some ways that shopping at the market for food from Teodora or other sellers, tending to Buell, or getting a shave and haircut from Luis, still continued as ever, ordinary as anything. He and Sadie still cooked meals and washed dishes and tended to Dusty and Dido.

The world hadn’t changed. He had. And yet, maybe that was a good thing, seeing that everything within him stayed contained in the frame of a thing familiar and understood. It made it more easily grasped, somehow, and it seemed like there was less to worry about things snapping back to the way they had been. The world didn’t seem to regard Arthur Griffith, ex-Morgan ex-outlaw, changing into someone new as some reckless trespass that knocked everything out of alignment.

“Pitayas and mangoes,” Teodora said, shaking her fluffy cloud of ink-black hair and laughing at him, handing the wooden lathe basket over with both the knobbly pink fruits and the smooth red and green shaded ovals. “Particular cravings by Sadie, is it?” She winked at him. He looked at her, confused. “Guess not.”

“Ain’t sure I follow.”

She clicked her tongue, smiling to herself. “Women tend to crave certain things when they’re pregnant.”

“Oh.” He hadn’t seen that with Eliza, given she’d been so far along by the time he finally knew about Isaac, and those few days he’d stayed had been a frenzy of trying to get her settled into a new place, a new life, trying his best to do what little he could to repair the damage done. Chances were she wouldn’t have trusted him with any kind of desire for a particular food then, wary as she had to be of this strange man who she’d shared too many drinks and then a bed with one hot August night. He hadn’t seen it with Abigail either. Maybe she hadn’t felt able to say something, knowing full well that John was balking like hell at taking responsibility, and likely worrying that speaking up for anything special would be asking to be seen as an unwanted burden. Chances were if she’d needed anything, she’d confided it to Susan. “No, nothing like that.”

“Suppose it’s a bit soon.” He must have given her another of those uncomprehending looks, because that earned another low chuckle. “You two come back into town a week ago after that long trip up north looking as you did, looking at each other like you did? You could have just told folks you were finally taking a honeymoon.” 

He could feel himself blushing. Had they really been that obvious to everyone, coming back to Chuparosa after passing that afternoon at night on the shore of Lake Don Julio? Apparently. Trying to think fast, he managed, “Didn’t want to make some big thing of it. We been married long enough and all.”

“And focused on beating tuberculosis and hunting bounties for most of it,” Teodora said dryly. “Obviously you needed some time to get away from other things and be together. It’s good to see you both happy.” 

“Thanks.” He hefted the basket in one hand by way of acknowledgment, then headed home to drop that with some other groceries. 

Pitaya and mangoes. It felt like a day for a little in-joke. He wouldn’t forget how it had been with Teodora that first day when they showed up to Chuparosa, two Americans completely out of their element, him struggling with the last threads of his strength, both of them bewildered and scared and still shaken to the core by the last few months they’d endured. She’d given them those pitayas then, directed them to Felipe, and treated them kindly. Since then it felt like he couldn’t shake the notion of those pitayas being associated with some kind of hope, however slim those hopes had been that November day. Every time he ate one, still alive to do it, it felt like a reminder of how far he’d come. 

As for mangoes, well, much as Dutch had carped about them, it felt like retirement from the outlaw life, enjoying life, and eating a mango felt deserved, even if it was by the sands of the Perdidan desert rather than a Tahitian beach. Didn’t hurt that they were delicious.

Putting the groceries down in the kitchen, he paused, looked around a moment, turning, leaning back against the counter. Feeling the simple pleasure of being in his home, knowing he belonged here. Putting down some roots. Sadie was at the hotel already, but the echo of her was in this place nonetheless, and it was theirs, together. 

_It’s good to see you both happy_ , Teodora said. Happy. For so long he’d thought that the gaps in the misery, the simple temporary cessation of pain, was his experience of happiness, or as close to it as he’d ever come. A crooked and lopsided equation, the brightness of the highs never balancing out the darkest depths, but he’d figured that was because of what an awful worthless bastard he was. He saw differently now, felt differently now.

_She loves me. She really does. We’re getting married today._

_I’m happy._

_I’m actually happy._

He couldn’t have imagined that kind of joy existed, not for him. It still touched him with fear sometimes, looking at it and wondering if there would be some price to pay, because it felt like something taken undeservedly.

But it wasn’t. He’d stolen nothing, not this time. He never had with her. Everything he had from her was all freely given. It was only now seeing it all in hindsight that he could appreciate how much they both must have wanted all of this before they could ever admit it to themselves, let alone each other. They’d arrived here in Chuparosa both broken and exhausted and hopeless. The fact she hadn’t been dying of lung disease didn’t mean she hadn’t been near her end in other ways. They’d leaned on each other, at first scared and desperate, and then by deliberate choice, for so long that they’d slowly grown together, gotten stronger. Eventually there had been some point, he wasn’t sure when, that the strands of their lives got so interwoven that they couldn’t have pulled back apart without tearing each other to pieces.

He hadn’t had a thing like that, not since he was a kid. Some nights he lay awake in that bed in Chuparosa, safe and happy and with Sadie curled up beside him, soft and warm, and remembered how it had been to fight so hard for survival, for scraps, for safety. He and Benji had been something forged in desperation that became a friendship strong as steel. Looking out for each other, fighting by each other’s side when it was called for, always having each other’s backs. Sometimes he remembered that kiss, all childish clumsiness and the taste of oranges. Both of them a pair of kids too afraid to do anything with it beyond that one kiss, and then Benji was gone. At least he’d kissed back. At least he’d done that. He’d feared at first it was some kind of punishment from God, then he’d felt the anger of a cruel and shitty world saying once again that a discarded street brat deserved nothing. Almost twenty-four years now, and he’d never know what had happened, whether Benji was alive or dead. But the love had been there, even so.

Benji, Mary, Eliza--he’d always been too hesitant, too afraid to be able to say what it was he wanted, to hope for it, to dare to turn fragile dreams into reality. To believe that he was more than someone who’d been told over and over through the years in so many ways that he was good for nobody, good only for what use others could find in him. He’d instead let it all happen around him, and watched chances crumble to dust, and known himself for a failure. Telling himself nobody else would be hurt for dreams he shouldn’t have dreamed in the first place. 

Sadie kept insisting it wasn’t him Mary and Eliza hadn’t wanted, it was the life he was living. Making a distinction he hadn’t and couldn’t for so many years, because there was no man separate from all of it. His whole existence was the gang, the only real thing to him, everything he was and would ever be. If he wasn’t an outlaw, a Van Der Linde boy, what was he? Nothing and nobody. He’d had to learn better than that, make himself into his own person.

He could count himself lucky that for a second time in his life, he’d found someone who would stand as a true partner. They had made a life together long, long before a little too much tequila gave them the bravery to risk admitting they wanted another part to that. Long before he’d mustered his nerve at Ojo del Diablo. Long before he’d offered to teach her to swim, leaving it to Sadie to decide exactly what might happen between them on that lakeshore. What had happened between them these last weeks was only accepting all of it, and facing the last ghosts and fears. Being that way felt an almost agonizing relief, so much easier than all the years of struggle.

He headed for the hotel, climbing the stairs, knocking politely on the door of the bathroom. Couldn’t help it, because old habits died pretty hard on that, and the long-established instinct was there to give her privacy. Though he also found himself smiling, remembering a thing she’d said once. “You want some help in there?”

He heard Sadie’s low laugh. “Well, that sure don’t sound like Dolores.” 

Yeah, Dolores had knocked and offered too when he’d had a bath, and he’d turned her down on it. Nice woman, one hell of a poker dealer, but by the point they’d moved to Chuparosa, the only woman’s hands he’d wanted on his skin were Sadie’s, even if he’d never believed that could be so. Taking her laughing comment as an invitation, he opened the door, stepping into the steamy air of the bathroom, Sadie in the tub, lying back with her eyes half-closed. They opened at the sound of him coming in and shutting the door behind him.

She sat up, looking at him with that sly cat’s smile. “So do I gotta pay extra for the help?”

He shrugged, leaning back against the door for a moment. “Didn’t you say it’s some kind of husbandly duty?”

“Getting an early start on that? Admirable.”

“I got an early start on other husbandly duties too, it’d seem,” he answered her with wry good humor. Held up a hand, telling her, “No complaints on my part, mind.” 

Absolutely no complaints at all. He couldn’t have imagined all of that. Standing on that sandy shore, feeling her gaze on him almost like a physical touch, only hoping like hell that she wasn’t going to decide she’d made a bad bargain. Hoping like hell he wouldn’t hurt or frighten her. Hoping beyond reason that everything they had wouldn’t come crashing down at this last obstacle. 

Sometimes things came down to pure grit and balls, and deciding to take the risk. He could have waited for that night back in Chuparosa, and seen what happened. It would have been good, but he suspected facing each other by lantern light in their bedroom, the fears would have crept beneath the sheets with them even more than they, because there would have been more time to think, to worry. Maybe he’d needed that for himself, to throw himself right into it and see what happened, and either his fears would be confirmed or laid to rest. It was the latter, as it happened. He’d known it would be different with her, but he couldn’t have imagined all of it, of what it felt like to lay everything of himself out, heart and soul and body, and see it treated with such love and gentleness, giving all of him such a feeling of having worth. 

He’d flung himself over that cliff only praying she wouldn’t let him fall, and she hadn’t. He should have known. No, he’d known. He only hadn’t believed, not fully. _Have some Goddamn faith, huh?_

She twisted her hair up in a knot, tying it in on itself so that her neck and shoulders and back now sat exposed, dusted heavily with freckles. “Didn’t you hear you ain’t supposed to see the bride before the wedding?”

“I thought I wasn’t supposed to see you in your wedding dress,” he answered. “Don’t look like you’ve got a dress on here.” Grit and balls indeed, but something within him thrilled to be able to tease like this, to dare that kind of talk, and see that it settled easily between them as a simple and ordinary thing. As he spoke, he unbuttoned his shirt, taking off his pants too, leaving them on the chair along with her clothes. No point getting his own clothes wet here, given he’d have to wear them home.

She let out another of those low chuckles. “Got a point.” She leaned forward, arms on the edge of the tub. “Well, then, if you’re offering.” 

Kneeling behind her, he saw with her hair up how the fine wisps of hair at the nape of her neck curled in the heat and steam. Reaching out, putting one hand on her shoulder, he leaned in and kissed her between her shoulders. “Sure.” He reached for the washcloth that she handed him back over her shoulder, scrubbing her back gently, carefully. Wishing a little that there wasn’t that bit of cloth there, but there would be time for that tonight. This was more than enough for right now, a small piece of some private intimate world he’d known was there, but never truly dared to dream would be for him.

She let her hair down after that, and he let himself indulge in a few memories of her at the lake combing out her wet hair with her fingers to let it fall free, like some fearless and wild water spirit. The sight of her, all shades of gold with blond hair and sun-kissed skin and amber eyes, reaching for him without hesitation, and him thinking with a sense of awe, _This is someone who loves me._

She touched him even more now these past few days, and he couldn’t imagine how he’d lived without that for so many years. He’d turned away from so much. Trying so hard to be the good son, the talented outlaw, the feared enforcer, the responsible senior gun. Even when he was barely more than a kid, trying to be the husband Mary had needed, trying to be a father to Isaac in guilty stolen moments. Struggling and trying to force himself into the shape everyone else wanted him to be so that he could be acceptable. Bruising and cutting and breaking himself by it, seeing only how it hurt and didn’t fit, and fearing it must be some flaw and lack in him. 

_Let go. Just...let go._ She’d told him that back at the lake, whispered it to him. Must have sensed him struggling with the notion of wanting so much, feeling so much, and somehow not being enough for all of it. 

She’d looked at him and said with her words and her actions, _I know you, I see you, and I love you._ Said, _You’re good. You’re enough._

It wasn’t simply making love that did it, as fine as that had been that day, and pretty damn constantly ever since. It was only that being the last thing to face that lurking shadow of fear that yes, she liked him _so far_ , but now in wanting this next step he’d overreach, disappoint her, and she’d see the truth of him.

But he could look back now and see all of the truths right in front of him. She’d cared enough to save his life, to bring him here to Mexico in a desperate attempt to keep him alive. She’d called him her husband to everyone for over a year without hesitation. True, it had been an act, but she’d still lived it without shame. She’d stayed with him so many times when she could have walked away, and instead chose to embrace going even deeper into living a life with him. She’d seen the worst and darkest and ugliest in him and not turned away. She’d said she loved him, that he made her happy. He knew now she wasn’t faking enthusiasm in how she looked at him, touched him, reached for him, said his name in the throes of pleasure.

It was like braiding all those strands together carefully into a rope strong enough to hold back the fear, at least mostly. She loved him, without dangling her approval as a prize above his head, expecting him to jump for it, waiting to see if he succeeded or failed. She loved him, even when he messed up. She didn’t expect him to give and give and wait anxiously for her judgment of it--she simply gave right back in equal measure. Such a stupidly simple sounding thing, to be enough, just as he was, and see that there was nothing left to fear. But it meant everything. Suddenly it felt like the shape of him fit, and it was no easy thing still, but he could feel how much less of a burden everything felt. 

Helping her rinse out that long, glorious hair of hers, she glanced back over her shoulder at him. “You next?” she offered with a smile, turning to him, leaning her chin on crossed arms on the edge of the bath.

Well, he had been planning to have a bath after her anyway, and he couldn’t help but like the idea. He’d always wanted something like this, hadn’t he? “Might take you longer on my back. Got a bit more of it than you.”

“I got more hair,” she patted her hair, dripping water, “so guess we come out even.”

“I got my share, just about,” he said, wryly gesturing to his chest and arms and thereabouts, “just ain’t all on my head.”

She got that smile again, reaching out with one wet hand and running it over his chest, ruffling the hair there back and forth for a moment. “No complaints from me.” She looked up at his face. “You look nice.” Would hearing a thing like that ever lose its wonder? He hoped not. Her hand rose, tracing his jaw, his beard neatly close-cropped for the day, her touch lingering as if she too savored the idea that they didn’t have to take care now of lines not to be crossed. She tapped his chin lightly with her thumb. “I always did wonder--how’d you get them scars?”

She meant the two parallel scars there. Not the first time he’d been asked. He decided to have a little fun. “Real unfortunate mishap my first time shaving.”

One eyebrow rose. “Sure.”

“Barely escaped a cougar?”

She let out a snort of amusement. “And that little bit’s all you got for your troubles?” 

“Chelonian ritual mark?”

“Worship turtles, do you?”

“Sure, yeah, I’m all about them turtles. All right, saloon fight over a woman?”

“Now I know you’re full of shit.”

He gave in, taking her hand in his, kissing her palm. “Horse bolted on me when I was fifteen, learning to ride. Got thrown and gashed my chin open in a couple places on some rocks in the road. Susan stitched me up.” He reached up, brushing the hair from her forehead, tracing the arcing scar over her right brow. “This one?” he asked her.

“Jake and me blowing up a big boulder on his folks’ land. We was being young and impatient and stupid. Rock chip flew and hit me. Lucky I didn’t lose an eye, I suppose.” 

He sat there, fingers still entwined with hers. “Lucky enough we survived being young and impatient and stupid. I got my share of foolishness there for sure.”

“So what are we now if we ain’t young and impatient and stupid?” she said, half-jokingly.

“Older. Wiser. Plenty scarred up. Maybe that makes being brave enough to still dream things mean more. I don’t know.” He leaned in and kissed her, just for a moment.

“Maybe.” She looked back at him, eyes earnest and steady. “It ain’t the easiest. Marrying again. Feels a little like...daring God or fate or whatever.” She bit her lip, shaking her head. “I suppose you know that when it comes to the notion of having kids, though.” 

She wasn’t wrong. Calling up his memories and his grief and his guilt up in Ambarino had helped. It let the wound close, finally. But it didn’t take everything away. There would always be that aching void within him in the shape of Isaac, a little boy who’d always be his firstborn. To lay that fear aside and dare to be a father again, knowing the sheer awful wrongness of outliving a child, wasn’t easy. Even more so given how he’d be that much more a part of any kid’s life, truly being their father, and he didn’t think the grief could be deeper, because he’d loved Isaac so damn much even if he’d been too scared to be there, but the hole ripped in his life would be that much greater. “I do, yeah.”

“You’re worth it, though,” she said softly, eyes on his, and he looked back at her, feeling the quiet joy within him at hearing that. 

“So are you.” He’d seen these last few days, up close as he’d been, that Sadie had a few grey threads in that beautiful hair of hers too. Neither of them were young and full of effortless hope anymore. Some of the years had been truly unkind ones. But they still had dreams that glowed bright, untarnished. Delayed dreams, true, but not dreams lost.

She’d dare fate by marrying again. He’d test it by trying for kids again. The fear was there, but the excitement now outweighed it, and the hope. They could still have the things they wanted, and probably cherish them all the more after waiting so long. He looked at her, thumb running over the back of her hand in a small caress. Weighing the thought, the words, rolling them around in his mind. 

She’d waited years for the chance at children, and been denied it in the end with Jake. Had said maybe they’d take a few months first to let things settle, but he suspected she’d offered that as an olive branch to him, knowing how much he longed for and feared the idea at the same time. Maybe believing she’d need that time herself to settle in with a husband who wasn’t Jake. 

The thing was, now that they’d let themselves cross those final barriers, the last pieces fell into place so easily. Not much had changed, except for the joy and sweetness of the physical intimacy they’d discovered together. But they’d been friends who’d been as good as husband and wife already for months. It was only mustering the courage of dusting off those dreams, offering them up to each other, and then the faint edge of fright at sex, that had been the hesitation.

There was a dark whisper in the corner of his mind, that old familiar voice that he hated to admit sounded a little like Dutch. _Maybe all she wants you for is to serve as a stud. She’ll put up with the rest of your bullshit for it, but it ain’t you she really wants. Or else she’s just happy to have someone who’s lowly enough himself to not look at her as a ruined woman._

 _Fuck. Off._ He knew the notion that rape was a stain that didn’t come off for a woman, that she was forever dishonored in some way, and for men, shit, they wouldn’t even acknowledge the possibility. She wasn’t ruined. She was stronger than anyone he knew, to face that squarely, because God knew he understood full well himself what kind of guts that took to shed the shame and fear. Besides, if all Sadie wanted was a baby, she could have gotten any man to do the honors. She wouldn’t have waited for this, for him, carefully and steadily built this life together. He’d waited too, and if he was ready to be a husband, maybe he had the courage to take the leap here and see if he could be a father, for real this time. 

“Do you think…” He started again. “Daisy,” using that soft nickname that came so easily to his lips. “I know how much you want kids. How long you was waiting even for a chance with Jake. And...it’s been a long wait for me too. For all this. Since Mary. Since Isaac. You’d thought that I’d need time. But if you wanted to start trying now, I...it feels like we don’t have nothing to be afraid of anymore, you know what I mean?” 

She blinked, and he thought he saw the sudden shine of tears there. “It’s all right crying on your wedding day if it’s happy tears, right?” she said with a watery chuckle. “Art,” and the sweetness of that nickname on her lips felt like a caress, “I swear, you’re a man full of surprises.”

“Good ones, I hope?” he asked her hesitantly. “I mean, if you need more time yourself, OK by me.”

“Good ones, yeah. And it’s a hell of a thing, not being afraid.” Her eyes locked with his. “I expect you ain’t never felt that.”

She saw through him, and somehow, that didn’t unsettle him like it would have before. “Maybe not.”

“Seems you make for one bold fella when you ain’t scared of yourself.” She smiled, a gentle curve of her lips. “It’s a real fine look on you.” 

“Got a hell of a woman who believed enough to help get me there.”

Her smile widened at that. “Then all right. Maybe we start trying tonight.” She looked at him with such happiness in her eyes at that, and it still made his heart skip a beat to think that he could be the cause of that. _I make her happy. She said that._ She pushed up to her knees, water dripping off her skin. “But let’s get you a bath of your own here. We gotta get ready still.”

He had to wonder if life would be like this from now on, the joy in this intimacy, moments both great and small, some known already and some yet to be discovered. He let himself live in this moment, feeling the brush of Sadie’s hands on his shoulders and back, washing him down, touching him with the same deliberate softness as she had in bed. Knowing that she loved him, that he mattered to her. 

Remembering that last bath in Valentine as part of his ritual of readying himself to go die, impulsively accepting the offer of assistance, so aware how shockingly terrible his TB-emaciated body looked, but so tired that any help at all felt worth it. Told himself it wasn’t like he’d have to live with that poor woman’s disgust for that long. He’d closed his eyes, letting her help wash him, feeling a strange gentleness in her rather than the brisk revulsion he’d expected. As if she known that her hands would be the last ones on the skin of this sad, pathetically lonely and dying man who’d pay an extra quarter both out of exhaustion and to simply to be touched one last time by another human being in this rented moment of intimacy.

She’d told him her name: Anastasia. Though he’d remembered it, remembered her, a pretty woman, buxom and red-haired and freckled. He wasn’t surprised she didn’t remember him. He knew for painted ladies that the men weren’t all that memorable, and besides there was very little of the man he’d been five months ago, both physically and otherwise. She had no cause to recall a man who’d given her rude words carefully calculated so she’d turn away in irritation. _How much you cost anyway? Didn’t know I was talking to a lady._

Acting, as usual. Playing his damn role so that Javier and Charles could see it, and get off his back about not going with women. Better that they thought him a clumsy oaf who offended women readily than have to explain the truth.

He’d been a jackass to her that summer, and she’d treated him so kindly that fall. No fake small talk between them, with Anastasia laughing and pretending she was enjoying every second of it. They’d talked about real things, her family back in Wisconsin, her fiance who’d died of TB. She’d told him he had kind eyes, that it was a shame a nice man like him had seen such bad luck. He told her he’d nearly been married, once, and she’d never bathed him like this, though of course Mary realistically couldn’t have risked that given all society’s rules were against her. 

She’d asked if he wanted to come back to her room, her voice a bit thick with emotion. He knew what she was offering by that. For the merest instant, he’d been tempted. If he couldn’t have love, here was at least a moment of freely offered generosity before he died. It was pity, true, but it was kindness too. She was lonely as well, he suspected, and likely she’d want to pretend he was that dead man she’d loved, and he was beyond worrying about that. Seemed only fair someone do to him what he’d done to Eliza anyway, in drunkenly pretending her to be Mary. 

But the dread of possibly leaving another fatherless child behind him, and the sheer exhaustion carved deep in his bones, readily stayed him. He’d needed every ounce of his strength for what was to come, to make right what he could. Couldn’t allow himself spending it on something wholly selfish, if he could even muster the energy in the first place. Besides, a sweet, lively woman like that shouldn’t waste her kindness on a man with a foot and a half in the grave.

He’d given Anastasia some money when he left. Told her that she was a real fine lady, to maybe atone for his words back in June. Hoped like hell she’d used that money to go chase a dream of her own. Maybe one more life he’d helped change for the better in the end. He could hope for that. 

“You all right?” Sadie asked, her hands stilling on his shoulders. “You feel about a thousand miles away.”

Not quite a thousand. But it was no hard thing to draw himself back to the present, to Sadie, to today. Letting that piece of the past go as peacefully as he could. “I’m good. Just got a bit lost in my thoughts for a minute.”

By the time they got home, scrubbed clean, the expected folks had arrived, waiting under the shaded awning. Albert, with his camera, and Felipe, who’d saved both their lives from disease now. Calderón, and with her, Pedro and Juanita. Given those two were probably the best friends they had in Chuparosa, it felt strange to not let them in on at least some portion of the truth, admitting that he and Sadie weren’t married, that they’d been good friends all along but it was only in the last few weeks things had finally taken another turn to boot. 

They’d taken it well. Being at Las Hermanas as they’d been themselves, they understood a lie hastily thrown out there so that Sadie would be able to stick with him, especially in a strange new place like that. True, in hindsight, they couldn’t have known that maybe they could have asked for her to be able to stay at the convent as the closest he had to family, and maybe it would have happened. But they couldn’t know that for sure, and he couldn’t regret that impulsive fib. It had let them stay together when they’d needed each other the most, and it was all part of what led them to where they’d been meant to be. 

Besides, it wasn’t exactly like the Estevezes followed the regular path to happiness themselves, being as Pedro was a TB patient starting things in his life near forty himself, and Juanita an ex-nun. But that didn’t matter. They were happy. The newlywed joy was still sharp in them, in the way Juanita looked at her husband, the way he reached out and touched her hand as she passed. Things he saw with clarity now, knowing them within himself. 

Sadie headed to the bedroom with the other women, and he went to the spare bedroom himself, where he’d left his things that morning. Getting dressed in the suit tailored for him, fitting every bit as fine as the one he’d lost. Smiling a little at the dark burgundy tie, the vest with the flair of the stripes turned diagonal, wondering what Sadie would look like in that dress. He’d see soon enough.

He left the jacket off for the moment, given the heat, and let Pedro and Felipe into the room, supposedly to share whatever wisdom they had, he supposed. It wasn’t like Sadie who could use other women helping with her hair or the like. He was dressed, and he was ready. The wedding would be simple, quiet. Getting married out on the rooftop patio, among the flowers and herbs and the like. No need for a big fuss. Though for a few moments he couldn’t help but imagine what it would have been like had they still been back with the gang, and somehow he and Sadie found this kind of happiness together. Swanson could have married them, after all. His struggles with opium and the bottle didn’t take away his ordination.

He likely would have insisted on getting a hotel if they were anywhere remotely near a town, or if nothing else, pitching tent a good ways off. Not wanting ribald good wishes yelled at them on their wedding night, and the need for trying to keep it down besides.

But before that, it would have been one hell of a party. Music and dancing and laughter and whiskey, and most of all being with family, happy for them. He missed them so damn much right then. Sadie had been married once before without family there, so he could manage it too. But the longing right then was sharp. Especially for Hosea, looking at him with that affectionate pride, trying to give him some bits of wisdom gleaned from his marriage to Bessie. _You’ll play your hand better than I ever did._ John, and hopefully he’d gotten things straight with Abigail without needing all the disasters they’d endured. Susan, probably beaming when nobody but him was looking in that way she’d had. Karen, Tilly, Mary-Beth, Charles, Sean, Lenny, Javier, even Uncle and Kieran and Molly and Bill. Dutch, well--still a complicated thought. But he liked to believe Dutch would have been happy for him, in that part of him that had cared.

He breathed in slowly, trying to work around that crushing sense of loss once again remembered. The ones who’d died were with him all the same, weren’t they? The ones still alive, they were off living their own lives and hopefully being happy, but something of them was here today nonetheless too. He’d changed, but that didn’t mean they weren’t still family. 

“Any last advice?” he asked them. The newlywed and the widower, and somehow that seemed to sum up the whole spectrum of things, the keenest hope of the beginning and the deepest sorrow of an untimely end. But he expected given the choice, Felipe would be like Sadie and say that the years with Luisa had been worth it, even if they’d been fewer than he’d hoped.

Felipe just shook his head and laughed, saying teasingly, “Don’t wear yourself out. Same restrictions--you get tired, you rest. She’ll understand.” It had been one hell of an awkward but amusing discussion with him earlier that week, going in for his Cactus session and admitting that yes, he did know how things were in bed with Sadie, and he could handle the strain just fine, thanks. Felipe had started laughing, saying he’d known that would happen. He patted Arthur on the shoulder reassuringly. “You got a second chance. It’s good to see you using it.”

Pedro smiled. “Don’t dwell too much on years gone by. You know it is with the TB. Makes you realize we’re all here only a little while. So be happy together with what time you’ve got.”

“All right, then.” He reached for his jacket, shrugging it on, settling the shoulders of it. Headed out for the rooftop, ready for this. It was everything he’d ever wanted, after all.

Albert had set up his camera, and Calderón waited there too. No Sadie just yet, but they didn’t have to wait long, and he couldn’t resist turning to look at her, escorted by Juanita. She looked beautiful, as ever, but the sight of her in that dress, the stripes and ruffles, somehow both soft and bold all at once, seemed to suit her perfectly. She’d draped a lace mantilla over her hair, the wispy fineness of it settling like mist, as a nod to Mexico, rather than wearing a veil over her face.

Suddenly he was glad he hadn’t seen the dress until now. Superstition, perhaps, but there was something stunning all the same in seeing her in it for the first time today, when it was all real. She took his hand, leaning in to whisper, “You nervous?”

“Little bit.” Not doubts so much as the gravity of the whole thing hitting him, undeniable and wonderful. Things changed today, for good. They’d be married. They’d start trying to have those kids. He’d joked, tongue-in-cheek, that given women usually changed their names on marrying, he was fine with doing so himself. But he hadn’t realized how truthful that felt until just this moment. She’d seen the worst of him in the past, and still stood by him. He wanted to keep giving her the best, the parts of him that she somehow had helped coax out and let safely grow. It felt like today he let go of Arthur Morgan, and stepped into the future as Arthur Griffith, finally letting himself become someone he’d always wanted to be.

She smiled, squeezing his hand in hers in reassurance. Calderón started the ceremony, but he admittedly didn’t pay as much attention to the words, intent only on Sadie, her eyes on his, steady as they’d been back at Lake Don Julio. 

He’d sworn himself to her in every way he could, heart and soul and body too, but it felt good to say the words openly, before God, before the law. 

Her middle name was Lorna. Another thing he hadn’t known until Calderón asked on that last visit to Las Hermanas, preparing for the wedding, giving them the vows to memorize. Chances were there would be more things he found out about her yet, and he looked forward to that eagerly.

Eyes on hers, he made those promises, words of an ancient and formal ritual, and there was comfort in the weight of that. “I, Arthur Hugh, take you, Sadie Lorna, for my lawful wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better, for worse, for richer, for poorer, in sickness,” he couldn’t help but pause there for an instant to give that particular one its due weight for all she’d done for him even before Bluestone Ridge, “and in health, until death do us part.”

She repeated those same vows back to him, and he felt the deep truth running through them. They weren’t just words, pretty concepts, because they had lived that life. Ragged and desperate and angry and on the run through four different states, then coming here to Mexico, trying so hard to heal, to believe in something good again. They’d seen each other through poorer and worse and sickness already, and still here they were, side by side. He wished with everything in him that they’d keep seeing more of the finer half of that equation. They could do with some richer and better and good health. It felt like they’d earned that. 

He had to bend down a little for Calderón to loop one end of the long strand of rosary beads, woven with flowers, around his shoulders, and then, with a twist of it between them, putting it around Sadie’s shoulders as well. He’d seen this at Pedro and Juanita’s wedding, and Calderón had explained it. Doing it a bit differently here, no kneeling and the like, but then, they weren’t having anything like a full Catholic wedding mass. _Lazo_ , the lasso, they called it, a Mexican tradition. Twisted into a figure eight that was also the symbol for infinity, love with no beginning and no end, binding the two of them together as one.

She’d taken off the ring this morning, only to give it to Calderón. They could have done like other folks in Nuevo Paraiso, both wearing their rings right-handed until the wedding and then switching them to the left, but too many questions in that, displaying the hallmarks of an engagement when they were claiming a marriage already. So she’d worn it left-handed as an engagement ring instead, and the matching platinum band they’d bought for him stayed in its little pouch, ready for today. It didn’t matter. They knew what it all meant.

He wondered for a moment how Calderón felt, holding the ring that had once been hers in fifteen years as a wife, blessing it now and giving it back to him to put it again on Sadie’s finger in earnest as her wedding ring. But she had given it to him for a reason, and he had to think she hoped for happiness for them both. He glanced up at her, thinking she had to understand his small nod of thanks at that, because she gave him a little smile in return. 

Sadie returned the favor, and the weight of the ring on his finger felt reassuring, tangible evidence of the promises made today. Plenty of American men didn’t wear a ring, though it had been more common in some states, Lemoyne and New Austin especially, probably because of the French and Spanish influences. 

He knew the law and society’s view on men and women and marriage, that a woman essentially disappeared into the possession of her husband. Knew what an act of faith it had to be for a woman to put her life, her well-being, her children, her property, her entire future, so utterly into a man’s hands. So many men saw a woman as a thing to be owned and used. For her to believe in him so much, equal to Jake who’d treated her as his partner in all things too, said more than enough about how she felt about him, how much she trusted him. He technically held the power, yes, but that didn’t mean he had to use it, and he swore to himself that he’d never see Sadie misused by that fact. Wearing that wedding ring felt like a little gesture, but a meaningful one all the same. She had as much claim on him as he had on her, and he would display that with honor and pride.

Then it was finished, Calderón saying it was done, that they were husband and wife, indelible as anything. He leaned down to kiss her, lightly, sealing the whole ritual by it, still keeping her hands held tightly in his. She didn’t disappear. He didn’t suddenly wake. This was real. Felt like he could barely contain the swell of joy in him at that, and he knew he was probably smiling like a fool, but none of that mattered at all.

Calderón taking the garland off of them, Albert had them stand against the adobe wall as backdrop, good as his word, taking the pictures for them. So he was a husband, really and truly. He wondered if his expression looked as dazed as he felt.

He picked Sadie up to carry her across at least some threshold, even if it was the upstairs entrance from the roof rather than the front door, but he figured it counted. Heard Pedro laughing merrily at that, and he set her down on her feet inside, and then they all headed downstairs. 

It was fairly simple hospitality, coffee and fruit, braised goat stew, and a cake that Juanita had baked for them. But sitting around the kitchen table with them, laughing and joking, it felt like a feast fit to beat any.

Albert bid goodbye first, promising to send the photographs. “Let me know if you find yourself getting hitched, Albert,” he said cheerfully, glad to see the man again.

“Well, there is someone in St. Denis I...think about very often,” the man admitted, a shy little smile on his face. “But surely they could do better than a bumbler like me.”

He leaned in, shaking his head, lowering his voice. “You love them eagles, I know it. Sometimes you gotta believe you got wings for flying and take a leap, you understand me?” He clapped Albert on the back. “That’s a metaphor, mind. Don’t go and get all reckless near cliff edges.” 

Felipe headed back to his patients, giving them a teasing well-wish in the form of saying to let him know in the future if they needed a doctor for delivering a baby, smiling as he did it. 

Pedro and Juanita left too, heading back to their own home, their own newlywed bliss. He caught Arthur’s eye as he left, shaking his head with a wry smile as he glanced towards Juanita, a look of quiet wonder in his eyes still when he looked at her. Arthur could read the question there as Pedro’s gaze flicked back to his. _Did you believe we’d see days like this?_

He shook his head in reply. No, he hadn’t, but he’d count himself a damn lucky man that he had lived this long, and found his way to a fine future like this. 

Calderón took her leave last, and he leaned down, letting her kiss him on the cheek after she did the same to Sadie. “I wish you two every happiness,” she said, smiling at them. “It’s good to see you’ve finally found your way.” Then she was gone, and they were alone.

Sadie glanced at the dishes. “Should we--”

The instinct was there to take care of all that before heading upstairs, and it felt peaceful and right to do so anyhow, the little domestic routines still there. He slipped off his jacket, undoing his shirt cuffs and rolling them up. “I wash, you dry.” No sense in her getting the long sleeves of that dress wet in a sink of water. 

They didn’t say much, but there was no need, just enjoying the comfortable nature of that small thing. Dishes done, letting Dusty and Dido back in and seeing them fed and watered for the night, things were settled for the night. She smiled, taking hold of his jacket, holding it in her hand. “Seems I’m real tired,” she drawled teasingly. “Might need a hand making it upstairs.” 

He’d carried her up those stairs once, that homecoming after the cholera, and they’d both flinched from the unintended implications of it. He saw what she was doing now, trying to mend that bruise between them by giving it another chance to be something sweet rather than sour. “Well, let’s hope you can stay awake a few hours.” He got an arm around her, reaching down and getting the other one behind her knees, lifting her up in a silken whisper of ruffled skirts. No uncertainty in either of them this time. “We got some official business to attend, don’t we? Ain’t all legal and binding until then,” he said, teasing right back at her.

Going up the stairs, carrying her into their bedroom, he set her down again, shutting the door behind them. He adored the animals, but sometimes company wasn’t wanted in that bed. Dido had been irritated, and Dusty anxious, at the sudden change in things, but they’d settled soon enough, and he’d made sure to spend his fair share of time with the dog, reassuring him. He could well understand the fear of feeling shoved aside because he hadn’t been enough to love. Dusty was still barely more than a puppy, but a different dog by far from Copper’s boisterous energy. But then, he hadn’t taken Copper in off the streets of some lonesome town, left there probably when his family had died. Found he could relate to the poor dog all too well on that, so he’d do his best to make sure Dusty felt safe even now. That would be a task for morning, though.

He lit the lantern by their bedside. Sadie put his jacket aside neatly on the chair, then turned back to him. “You sure?” she asked him gently, reaching up, one hand cradling his cheek.

She wasn’t asking about making love. He knew that. He reached up himself, caught her fingers in his, kissing them lightly. “Can’t say what’s gonna happen. But we’ll never know if we don’t try. I’m ready for that. We’re getting a fresh start today. So it seems right, don’t it?” Scared still, yes, but alongside that, there was the eagerness at the idea of seeing what children he and Sadie might have--meeting them, knowing them, loving them. 

“It does. I never did get to that blue ribbon anyway,” she said with a little laugh.

Her hair was held up with pins, and he found some delight in discovering them, pulling them one by one, kissing her in between each. Kissed her again once it was down around her shoulders, shining in the lamplight. “ _Te amo._ ” Spanish came so easily to his lips now, and it truly was a pretty sounding language, especially for words of love. Kissed her one more time. “ _Cariad_ ,” he whispered in her ear, feeling the faint shiver in her at the word.

She reached for him then, kissing him with more purpose, fingers moving to the buttons of his vest. He found the frustration and delight himself in all those tiny buttons fastening her dress. He couldn’t have imagined the intimacy and the trust of standing there, letting her slowly and carefully undress him, being trusted in kind to perform that service for her, but that was another bridge he’d crossed, another way he couldn’t go back to the man he’d used to be. He’d read once about alchemists, trying to transform lead into gold. Maybe love was its own kind of alchemy. 

She’d gotten so impatient two days ago she’d ripped buttons off his work shirt, and he’d torn one of her worn old cotton breastbands in his haste. They had plenty of passion between them, he was well aware, and he’d been startled to find out just how much had been lying quietly within him, only waiting for the right time, the right person. He’d thought so much rusted away and gone forever. Seemed that wasn’t the case. She seemed to love that, urging him on, and he expected she liked seeing him find those parts of himself, perhaps for the first time. He’d made up for a hell of a lot of last time this past week, knew himself far better now than he could have believed.

But tonight it was all leisurely, slow, and not from the shyness they’d had on the lakeshore, figuring each other out and being so careful to not prod old scars too hard. The dawdling now was its own reward, wanting to draw this out, make it last. Make this first time together in this bed as truly husband and wife, the first time they cast hopes to the wind and tried for a baby they both wanted so much, into something sweet and sacred.

Stretched out beside her on their bed, they kept themselves content for a long while with simply kissing, holding each other close. But eventually, that wasn’t enough, though the touches stayed soft, deliberate. Seeing her skin golden in the glow of the lamplight. Her body was growing as familiar to him as his own, but he thought he’d never lose the sense of wonder in touching her. Loving the feel of her, softness and strength both, and the fact that he could make her feel the way he did. Learning what she liked, and exactly how best to do it, became a keen pleasure in its own right. Feeling her hands on him in turn, no duty or sacrifice or reluctance, only love and desire and eagerness.

It was well after dark by the time they finally joined together, her eyes on his, her legs wrapped tightly around his hips, her fingers interwoven with his. Taking it achingly slowly, almost like a waking dream, letting go of one hand only so he could reach down and stroke her, kissing her at the same time. Feeling Sadie rising against his touch, arching, straining for that release, and the way her eyes went wide, the low gasp she made against his lips, the sheer incredible sensation of her finding that pleasure while he was inside of her, the fierce surge of something almost like pride at having made her feel so damn good. 

Loving and being loved in return, in equal measure. So simple, so easy, now that he’d stopped fighting it, and accepted what she’d wanted to give him, giving so freely now that he knew that love was a thing welcomed. She held him in the palm of her hand, heart and soul, and somehow, he wasn’t afraid. 

Lying there together afterwards, holding on to each other tightly, night air cooling their heated and sweaty skin, all he could feel was the happiness, the contentment. He had all that he’d longed for since he was a boy, now that he’d been brave enough to embrace it. He kissed Sadie, thinking with a calm certainty, _I’m home, with you._

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
 **Sketch of Sadie in her wedding dress** , captioned “May 1, 1901. I love Sadie Griffith."

 **Letter to Caroline from Sadie**  
Dear Caro,  
Happy news. You can call me Mrs. Saint Bandit Griffith. We got married on May 1st.

His name is Arthur. Yes, he rode with the Van Der Lindes, for a lot of years. He was an outlaw and he wasn’t if that makes any kind of sense. It was things he did but it wasn’t the true nature of him. He only did it since those he loved and counted as family were outlaws, and he feared to disappoint them. I expect if he’d been taking in by circus folk instead he’d have become some kind of lion tamer or whatever in order to please them. 

Though I got to admit I do envy him some the ability to shut unruly men up with a look and a few sharp words. It does come in handy. 

We actually got an offer to join a circus. Didn’t take it but the thought amuses, don’t it? Seems like you and me both are having some real adventures. Not bad for two poor sodbuster gals from Tumbleweed. 

Might be more adventure in store yet. Given we have learned some real good Spanish and land is cheap and opportunity plentiful, Arthur and me have talked about possibly going to South America someday. I find myself wanting to order books about that, read about all them strange places and animals and people, and dream a bit. 

But we are here in Mexico for a few more years yet, for his health. I didn’t write it before, but as he is now firmly part of the family you had best know. We ended up here cause he got tuberculosis back when things was all going bad. I expect that led to some of his searching his soul. I didn’t love him then like I do now, but I loved him as a dear friend all the same. Seeing him taking no mind for himself but fighting hard to save folk and bring some goodness into this world, I admired him. He gave everything he had left in him for them to have some hopes. There was a point I saw no chance he survived what he put himself through and yet he did and I was the one who found him. To that point it felt proper and best to respect a dying man’s wishes and help him by easing some of his burden in doing them things. But that seemed a sign from God that maybe this fella deserved someone fighting for him too. And lost as I was I did need something to fight for just then. Or someone. 

So we come down here. You and me both know lungers would come to New Austin but Mexico seemed a better choice at the time. We found a superb doctor here, running a TB ward at a convent (yes, we stayed at a convent for over a year, and you know Grandma Rosie is laughing in heaven at that). It gave me some measure of peace to be there, strange to say, after all I had been through in the six months prior. Been a slow, tortuous road for him, but he is one stubborn bastard. So he is alive and largely recovered already, though he has some ways to go yet. 

He offered to ride with me to Ambarino so I could make my peace with things. It helped. Hadn’t been back since it all happened and I did need to face it. I will always miss Jake but that don’t prevent me from being happy with Arthur even so.

Sending you a recent picture of myself as you asked, and you can see what he looks like too. Love to you and Harold and the kids. Might be in the next year or so that you hear about being an aunt yourself with any luck.

Sadie

(Enclosed: **Arthur and Sadie’s wedding picture** )


	30. Chuparosa II: The Lost and the Found I

He woke to the sound of Sadie’s bare feet padding across the floor, and the drawers on the wardrobe opening and closing. Opened bleary eyes to the morning sunlight streaming through the window, and her pulling on a shirt, a golden yellow striped one that suited her, bright as the sun, bright as her smiles.

As she passed by him, he reached out and caught her arm, tugging her back towards the bed. She didn’t resist, letting him pull her down beside him, feeling the vibration of her laughter in her chest as well as hearing it, before he kissed her, shoving aside the covers. Pushing the still-unbuttoned shirt from her shoulders, easing it from her arms, he hung it from one of the bedposts so it wouldn’t get crumpled.

Swiftly unbuttoning her cotton breastband, getting his hands on the softness of her breasts and kissing her, teasing her with his touch, he couldn’t help a smile at her tipping her head back, eyes half-closed in pleasure at it. Then she opened her eyes again, and gave a mock sigh of resignation, wiggling off her drawers herself. Dropping them on the floor, she lay back, putting a hand on his shoulder, pulling him over her. “Well, seems you’re waking just fine.” Her hand swept down his belly in a caress, and she paused for a moment, then reached down further, taking his cock in her hand, giving a deliberate stroke. “Yep, definitely getting up,” she said teasingly. 

He let out a bit of a choked laugh at that because it was damn hard to even breathe with the sweet torment she could put him through with her touch, but infinitely worth it, all of it. He wasn’t sure how he’d lived without this for so long, without everything of Sadie. It came only rarely to him, usually when he woke in the middle of the night, but sometimes there was the slightest edge of a dark worry because now there was something he could lose, and she’d lost this once already. He’d never had anything he hadn’t lost, after all. The fact it would all be worth it didn’t take away how much the pain would tear him apart.

But not this morning. Right now there was only her, and him, and the joy of love finally given and returned without hesitation or fear, her strong hands gripping his shoulders, the two of them moving together, building and building the feeling between them, back and forth in a call and answer. Knowing full well by now that she was tough here as everywhere, that he needn’t fear hurting her, that she actually seemed to relish it being fierce and wild between them. Six weeks they’d been married now, and it felt like every day brought its own small discoveries, wonderful and otherwise. Sometimes they had both to them, like the miracle of Sadie lying drowsily in his arms after the urgency and need was gone and done, all trust and tenderness and affection, and both of them quickly realizing the pain in the ass of two hot, sweaty bodies staying cuddled together too long because a June desert day, even in the morning, started out hot and only got hotter, so they’d have to move apart a bit. 

Though that didn’t matter. He thought in some ways this was the best of it. Being together after, lying on their sides in their bed facing each other, reaching out with small touches, lingering brushes of their fingers, eyes meeting, sometimes talking about ordinary things, sometimes no need for words at all. He hadn’t expected this peaceful, soft intimacy, and the blissful restfulness of it. This was the sort of thing only people who loved and cherished each other could have, and he had it, and that meant everything. It proved, maybe even more than making love, exactly what it was they had together. He loved her. She loved him. They’d chosen each other and would do so again and again, every day, in an infinite number of ways.

She nudged him lightly with her elbow, swinging her legs over the side of the bed and sitting up. “You awake?”

“Just about.” He sat up himself, running his hands through his hair, shaking off the feeling of sleepiness that usually followed sex only with some effort. Getting to his feet and heading to the washbasin, splashing some water on his face helped. Grabbing a washrag and starting to clean up, he heard her getting up behind him, felt one last trail of her fingers across his lower back as she grabbed a washrag of her own.

“Didn’t mind the delay,” he heard the languid amusement in her voice at that, “but we gotta get a move on if we wanna make Tesoro Azul before it gets blazing hot.”

It was in an area of Punta Orgullo that their travels and bounty hunts and the like hadn’t taken them to just yet, in the southeast of the region. They’d pulled out the map to be sure of it when Sadie came home yesterday with a letter from checking with the post office, while he’d gone and gotten the groceries. “You’re the one as got the letter--what’d Rodrigo say about it?” He’d found in his long and checkered outlaw career that postmasters and train station agents were useful as hell when it came to knowing most everyone’s business, and Rodrigo Fernandez was no exception.

“Turquoise mining town. Makes sense from the name, I’d guess.” He had to agree with that: _Blue Treasure_.

“So it’s Eduardo Montoya, on behalf of this Señor Del Rey--” He rummaged in the wardrobe, finding clean drawers. Saw Sadie’s clean drawers there too, and beside them, the stack of rags she used for her bleeding times. It hadn’t entirely escaped his notice that she hadn’t used them since right before they’d left for Ambarino. Wasn’t like he’d been able to be ignorant of that aspect of women’s lives, given numerous women in the gang talking with each other candidly, not to mention living so closely with Sadie as he’d been for the last year and a half. But he hadn’t asked, too afraid to dare give voice to that hope just yet. 

“ _Don_ Del Rey,” she corrected him, “from the letter.” So, an aristocrat. “Montoya made real sure we knew that.”

“Oh, _un hombre de la sangre azul_ , huh? A turquoise mine run by a genuine _hidalgo_. I must have missed you mentioning the ‘Don’.” They hadn’t dealt with that before here in Nuevo Paraiso. The cattle barons held their share of wealth and power, true, but even they and their estancias and ranches answered to the grand landowners stood even above them, the hereditary lords of the grand haciendas.

“You had other things on your mind last night,” she said dryly, but he saw the cheeky smile on her face while she fastened her breastband again. 

“Like you didn’t,” he retorted. “You just had your chance to read that letter at the post office, no distractions.”

“Distraction, am I?”

He paused, looking over at her and saying nothing, but arching an eyebrow in reply. She gave him one of those sly grins she had, but relented. “Rodrigo says he’s some huge name. One of the real big boys. Land grant dating all the way back to them conquistadors. Bastard of the Spanish royal family, to hear tell.”

“Preening about ancestry from some fella in his grave three hundred years at least by now? Loving this Del Rey already.” He couldn’t help a snort of amusement. “Least we did get rid of hereditary nobility in America.”

“Sure. Though I ain’t sure America is doing much better. We got a nobility rising, men who got a crazy amount of power. It’s just based on fat wallets, not ancient titles.” 

She had a point there, he had to admit. “True. Them folks in Lemoyne was blood-proud as any European aristocrat, I expect. Blueblood or no, I suppose the riches is all inherited too, so a couple generations later, all we’re gonna have in America is the pretense that power don’t come with a title.”

“Suppose that’s true. Feels about the same in the end, don’t it?” 

“Pretty well, yeah. Look at what Leviticus Cornwall could throw at us. Man could have hired the whole damn Pinkerton Agency to hound us to the ends of the earth.” He only realized that fully now, with enough distance from the hope and panic and Dutch’s insistence that all they had to do was run far enough, get rich enough. “I’m guessing that shark-eyed bastard Ross is still out there looking.” 

“You think?”

He thought back to the man he’d met on the riverbank, intense, quieter than Milton’s blustery fanaticism, but to Arthur’s mind, that made him very possibly more dangerous. “Milton was a rambling fool who kept letting us slip through his fingers, cause he wanted to make a big damn production of taking down them dastardly Van Der Lindes. Ross? He strikes me as a man who don’t care about the method, just wants the job done by any means. We’d have all ended shot dead on the spot or swinging on the gallows if he’d been in charge. He’s out there. And he’s hunting. Mark my words.” A faint shiver worked its way down his spine instinctively at that. Being a dead man afforded him some safety, but John had no such protection. _Wherever you ran, little brother, stay safe. And stay out of trouble, you dumbass._

It was a long pause before he spoke again, both of them lost in their thoughts. He turned back to the present only with some effort. “Anyway, Montoya don’t hold much with giving details, it seems. Guess he figured the impressive Del Rey name or the intrigue would bring us along.”

“He weren’t wrong on that,” she said wryly, pulling her shirt on and buttoning it this time. “Don’t mean it ain’t aggravating all the same.”

He couldn’t disagree with that. Reaching for his pants, putting them on, he shrugged, reaching for his own shirt. “So if nothing else, I get to go for a morning ride with the finest gal in Nuevo Paraiso. That don’t make for anything like wasted time.” Being able to say things like that, to know that affection was welcomed as it was, still felt like a gift. Perhaps it always would, even if the fear had gradually worn away like snow beneath the spring sun.

He half expected her to make what felt like the inevitable joke that they’d had a morning ride already, but she looked at him, a faint smile on her face. She reached up, touching his cheek, then kissed him with a quick brush of her lips against his. “You’re one sweet fella.” 

“I love you, Sadie Griffith.” To be able to say it so openly as that still felt like a marvel. He found himself smiling as he finished dressing. 

Given their dawdling, and letting Dusty out to take care of business there, that meant breakfast amounted to whatever they could eat while in the saddle and wash down with sips from their canteens. But they made good time towards Tesoro Azul all the same, talking of small things, enjoying the sights.

Riding up to the adobe walls, there was a stout wooden gate blocking further passage into the town, and he expected there might well be another one at the other end. Used as they’d gotten to open archways and the like, he raised an eyebrow. “Worried about Del Lobos?” Sadie asked, nodding to the gate.

Eyeing the wood, he shook his head. “It’s older than a couple years. Indians, maybe?” 

“Nuevo Paraiso’s on the border, so they’d have dealt with Comanche raids back in the day,” Sadie answered him. He’d heard about the fierce horsemen of the southern plains, passing through the southern states as he had with his father after his mother had died. “I remember the alarm going up a few times when I was a little kid. But it’s been twenty, twenty-five years since all that. No cause for it now.” 

No time to ponder it further in that moment, as there was a guard on the wall who demanded to know their business. “Here to see Señor Montoya,” Arthur answered, glancing up at him. “We was invited.”

Let in, the gate promptly shut behind them and barred again, the gatekeeper directed them, “You’ll find the _Jefe_ in the tavern.” He pointed towards a building about halfway down the town.

Eyeing the backside of the gate, he looked over the few townspeople out and about on the streets. They didn’t look at him and Sadie with curiosity, two _Americanos_ come into their well-protected town, but instead seemed to avert their eyes. Kept their heads down, loading a wagon with baskets of dull blue-green rocks that had to be rough turquoise from the nearby mine. Presumably most of the town’s people were away, down the mine. He heard the chanting of children’s voices in a tiny schoolhouse, reciting their lessons. That felt like about the only sign of life. He leaned in towards Sadie, saying in an undertone, “I’m thinking perhaps that gate’s to keep people in, not out.”

“What makes you say that?”

“It’s…” He shook his head. “It reminds me of the plantations on Guarma. Something about the way of them. Or maybe even Sisika. They’re beaten folk.” The plodding, weary look, the aversion to outsiders, that too-careful way of minding their own damn business.

Sadie’s brows knit, and she looked around, a muscle tightening in her jaw. Now she saw it too. “Well, let’s see what’s stirring,” Sadie replied, hitching Bob up at the tavern. He followed her into the cooler interior.

Not too many people inside, which he would expect in a hardworking town during the day, no different from Valentine or Annesburg or so many others he’d been through over the years. A couple of tables in the back dealing cards, which was about the usual. The two men fighting in the middle of the place wasn’t the usual, but from the way the tables and chairs surrounded a clear space, the men’s bare-chested state, and the handful of onlookers cheering and whooping and clapping, obviously it wasn’t a brawl. He glanced down at the floor beneath the men’s booted feet, seeing some old, dark bloodstains. So Tesoro Azul liked itself some bloodsport.

Sadie grabbed his arm, gesturing towards a table ringside, where two men sat, everyone else keeping a respectful distance. “Guessing that’s our man.” 

He nodded in reply to that, heading over. Identifying the one broadly built as a bull and keeping a watchful eye on things as likely a hired man, and the one watching the fight with keen interest as the man in charge. Knowing it was better, as usual, for him to make the introduction than Sadie, disliking that intensely, as usual. “Señor Montoya?”

Blue eyes flicked away from the fight to look at him. His man had been watching Arthur and Sadie approach the whole time, of course, sitting there with the quiet, intense readiness of a man prepared for a fight on a moment’s notice. He recognized that casual edge of vigilant violence well enough, given he’d lived that way himself for so many years. “Yes, sit down,” he gestured to the other chairs at the table. “Have a drink,” waving a hand towards the bottle of what looked like very good tequila. “I don’t like to discuss business except over a drink.”

He and Sadie sat, pouring a shot each of the liquor. One of the fighters made an end of the brawl. Montoya grimaced as another man laughed and clapped, throwing him a smirk. “Better luck next time, Eduardo.”

“Shit. Poorly matched.” He threw back his drink. “I’ll bring you a better dog next time, Luis,” he called with a laugh, as the other man headed out, with both his companion-slash-bodyguard and his staggering, limping and battered fighter. 

Arthur exchanged a glance with Sadie, seeing the confusion in her eyes too. _What in hell is going on here?_ “Who’s your friend?” Sadie finally ventured, voice casual.

“Luis is _jefe_ at Tesoro Oculto, another of Don Miguel’s mines. Southwest of here, across the border in Michitlan. Have you ever been?”

“No, only Nuevo Paraiso, I’m afraid.” Maybe they should have, although up until the last few months he hadn’t had the strength to travel that much, and then aside from the trip to Ambarino, they’d been trying to find what jobs they could to keep the money coming in.

“Oh, you should see it. Michitlan’s gorgeous. Along the coast, you know. Anyhow, Luis and I both have a passion for good fighters. We like to have some friendly matches.”

Arthur’s eyes went to the man on the floor, obviously unconscious. “Think that fella needs a doctor.”

“He’ll be tended to,” Montoya said smoothly. At that, two other men dragged the poor bastard off, to who knew where. He gestured to the drinks they’d poured. “So, to business. I’m the _jefe_ here at Tesoro Azul, on behalf of Don Miguel del Rey. Don Miguel spends most of his time in Mexico City, or his hacienda in Michitlan. He leaves the day to day attentions of his many business concerns to men like me.”

“No different from how big men run things in America,” Sadie observed dryly. It wasn’t like Leviticus Cornwall gave a shit about getting off his ass in whatever gilded palace he’d had in New York or Boston or wherever, and coming to the refinery or Annesburg or anywhere else his tentacles had reached, until the Van Der Lindes or Wapiti threatened his interests. 

“A man’s business interests get big enough, he’s gotta delegate, I suppose,” Arthur said with a shrug. Disliking the situation already, but like Montoya’s man here, keenly checking it out, assessing. He could see the right hand man--who Montoya hadn’t introduced--noticing that about him too, something changing in the air of his attention towards Arthur. A recognition of sorts passing between the two of them, he supposed, but it kept him wary all the same.

“Yes, then you do see. I had heard your names as Americans here in Mexico and capable people who can get a job done. Speaking of big men in America, I assume you’re familiar with the name Joshua Cornwall?” Montoya must have learned some English as a boy, because he managed the “J” sound that didn’t exist in Spanish without much trouble, which for a Mexican, said something about his likely education. He’d grown up with some privilege in his life.

“Not terribly,” Sadie said dryly. “Folk like us don’t have much dealing with that kind of social circle.”

“Yes, yes, of course. His father Leviticus was murdered by thugs a few years ago. Terrible, unfortunate business.”

“Truly,” Arthur murmured politely, offering the expected condolence. Though _terrible, unfortunate business_ about summed that whole disaster on the Annesburg docks up, as far as he was concerned. How stupid he’d been, still unable to admit to himself that Dutch was reveling in the violence increasingly unleashed by their situation, that now he seemed to be seeking it. Struggling to see beneath the fancy vests and big speeches and the proclamations of Evelyn Miller’s crackpot philosophy, there was only a man who had finally shown his appetite for blood and savagery and destruction. Not only with feet of clay, but a figure made of clay entire, lumpen and misshapen and increasingly monstrous, though still with that veneer of power and grace and charisma and charm, which made the whole picture all the more horrible.

“But it seems Cornwall the Younger has clear interests here in Mexico. Helping our great country modernize. Bringing us some of those tremendous American ideals and industry and helping us into the 20th century. Don Miguel is considering doing business.”

“But,” Arthur interjected, leaning back in his chair.

“Yes, but. There’s a problem. Well, several flies in the ointment, really, but with big dreams, one expects there to be obstacles, right? But there’s one in particular who might suit your...talents. There’s this man, Guillermo Fortuna. He lives in Campo Mirada with his family.”

Arthur held back a sigh, because somehow he wasn’t surprised this was the point of the invitation. When people heard that someone was capable of efficient violence, they tended to want to hire that for themselves. Julia Machado had at least had good cause, though, and that one all worked out for the best. This wouldn’t be the first offer they’d turned down on brutality for hire. “What’s he done?”

“He’s causing issues among the workers.”

So, probably had ideals and talked too much about them. No cause to intervene, so far as he was concerned. “And you want this Fortuna _problem_ resolved, of course. In what manner? You want him threatened into something? Beaten? Killed? All for the betterment of Nuevo Paraiso and Michitlan, of course.” Just the same as Lemieux kept citing a better St. Denis as the reason to send Arthur out doing his dirty work, appealing to the idea of dreams. Filthy hands to serve a clean cause. He’d heard it all before, done it all before. Lived that life for years and years with Dutch spinning that idea of it all being for some greater good, until all that remained was the reality of those filthy hands.

Montoya entirely missed his sarcasm. “You’ve done that before, I see.”

He felt Sadie’s hand on his knee under the table, not in any way flirtatious, but reassuring him. Obviously sensing the rise in his temper. _I’m here. I’m with you._ He downed his shot of tequila rapidly. “Can’t help you, mister.”

“So you’re not an idealist, but a practical man. I see. How much?”

“Oh, it’s no matter of the money. Just that I ain’t nobody’s thug or assassin.” _Not anymore._ “You want Fortuna beaten or dead, you find someone else. Or better yet, go do it yourself.” He got up, hands on the table, staring at Montoya. “Way I see it, some things a man shouldn’t be able to buy. He’s gotta be willing to get his hands dirty himself.” He’d told Sadie he wouldn’t be annoyed if their visit to Tesoro Azul turned into nothing, but Goddamn, he was annoyed. Not because of the waste of time, but because it was this. Another crudely carved petty tyrant harshly lording it up over his tiny kingdom, and really, he was _sick_ of men like this, and sick of them looking at him and seeing only a brutal moron they could unleash on those who pissed them off.

“Señora Griffith?” Montoya finally acknowledged Sadie directly.

“No, don’t think I’m gonna change his mind, cause I agree with him,” she told him with a shrug.

“Very well.” Montoya shrugged, sitting back in his chair. Though Arthur found himself strangely reluctant to turn his back on the man, knowing they’d made an enemy. 

Heading for the door, a ruckus in the corner caught his ear, a woman’s voice yelling drunkenly in mixed English and Spanish. “I told you before, you keep your hands to yourself, you miserable _cabron_!”

Montoya eyed his man. “Tomas?” So, the loyal dog did have a name.

Tomas sighed, rubbing his face tiredly with one hand. “She’s more Goddamn trouble than she’s worth, sir, drunk as she is during the day.”

“But she does keep the men drinking and playing cards at night,” Montoya answered. “That’s what matters.” 

He heard that exchange only behind him, headed for the corner as he was, knowing that voice. He hadn’t seen her, tucked away in the back in the shadows as she’d been. Though now it was undeniable, seeing her. Her blond hair was messy, and she’d gained a few more pounds, probably from all the alcohol, eyes bleary with it, her skin blotched and flushed in the way that those who drank too much for a good while had. But her clothes were clean. Most of all, she was here, and still alive. Pushing his way past the man she glowered at, he ventured, “Karen?”

She glanced up at him, and for just a moment, her green eyes went weary, ashamed. Then something fired to life in them. She reached up, gave a fond shove to his shoulder. “Hey, look at that, it’s big, tough old Arthur.”

He heard Sadie’s familiar footsteps behind him, and she moved past him to sit across from Karen. “Karen, we was all worried when you left,” she said.

“Sadie,” Karen muttered, glancing aside. “Like anyone cared? No need to worry, I’m doing just _fine_. What the hell you two doing down here in Mexico anyway?” She squinted at Arthur again. “Heh. You don’t look three quarters dead no more.”

He glanced at Sadie, saying lowly in Welsh, “Keep her as quiet as you can and I’m seeing about getting her out of here.” The last thing they needed was her saying something about Dutch or the like too loudly right now, and setting off an entire world of shit.

Sadie nodded, turning back to Karen, her tone warm and friendly. “What you been up to, anyway?”

He headed back to Montoya, who looked at him with renewed interest, a strange intensity in his eyes. “So, our blackjack dealer’s familiar to you.”

He’d handed that one over with how he’d reacted to her. “She tell you anything about what happened to her?” If Karen had been talking drunkenly about the gang, they had a huge problem.

“No. She doesn’t often say much, unless it’s to ask for another bottle. We keep her sober in the evenings to work, and she usually drinks away the daytime.” 

Dodged a bullet there, apparently, that Karen had kept her mouth shut and not gotten herself into trouble with a tongue loosened by liquor. Though he couldn’t sling too many stones there. Both of their troubles with liquor had usually been various escapades and mayhem, not spilling secrets. “She’s my sister.” Easy enough to pass that off, because while her hair was lighter than his, she was still big, blond, and green eyed too. They’d run that ruse of being siblings more than once. She’d usually done it to catch a man in a “compromising position” with his hands tugging at her skirts, and him walking in and playing the outraged brother who needed to be paid off to avoid murder on the spot. “She run off a couple years ago after her sweetheart got killed. Bad business. She was hurting real bad, you see. Been looking for her ever since.” It stuck in his craw a bit to bow and scrape to a man like this, but some politeness here wouldn’t hurt. “My wife and me thank you for, ah, looking after her. But she’s got family, and she needs more than blackjack and tequila right now. We’ll look after her from now on, of course. No need for her to be here causing you no more trouble, I’d reckon.”

“So glad to assist in a family reunion.” Montoya leaned forward, eyes meeting Arthur’s. “One problem. Her debt. She drinks far more in the daytime than she earns in the evening.” He smiled slowly. “Whether dealing cards or on her back. I hope it doesn’t bother you too terribly that she’s been fucked by dozens of men. Mexicans. All those brown hands on that fair lily-white skin.”

His temper rose, but not for the reason Montoya supposed. Trying to play to some sense of white superiority, and the notion of a woman’s shame at making that living. Expecting him to start a fight over some perceived outrage to his honor, or Karen’s honor, or the supposed collective honor of the white race, or whatever stupidity. He knew Karen and Mary Beth and Abigail had sold themselves sometimes before joining the gang to make ends meet, likely done it a few times here and there when robbing and pickpocketing and scamming didn’t work out. But Karen wasn’t all right, to make that choice for herself. Montoya had taken advantage of a woman in pain like this, alone and lost, and encouraged her to stay drowned in the bottle so he could best use her. 

With him speaking of debt with that knowing smile, now this place made sense. The man was running his own personal prison for the miners, little different from medieval serfdom so far as he was concerned. “I suppose she ain’t the only woman in this town you’ve stuck as a working girl. Bet you pay your miners only in credit too, and it’s only good at the company store, or here in the tavern.” It was on the top of his tongue to ask sarcastically how much a man in Tesoro Azul got screwed to get screwed--was it two weeks of pay, say, or maybe two months? But he held the remark back with effort. It wouldn’t help, and it’d only make things uglier. 

“It’s an efficient system. Runs very well in America too, as I understand.” He wasn’t wrong there. Arthur had seen it at work for sharecropping down in the southern states, and in various mining towns. It was its own kind of slavery. Montoya here just made it more obvious with the gate, presumably to keep folks from running off, or stealing any of the turquoise for themselves. “We provide for the workers. What else would they need? They’re simply too foolish to manage things themselves anyway. They’ll sign over a month’s wages for an hour with a woman.” Well, that answered that question, though he wasn’t sure he’d genuinely wanted to know. 

He wasn’t here to debate philosophy with a man who had no intention of listening anyway. Best to cut to the chase. “Sure. So tell me what her debt is, Senór Montoya, and I’ll make good on it. You can see she ain’t well. She needs her family.” He expected the man would vastly inflate it, knowing he had a fish on the line, but no matter. All that counted was getting Karen the hell out of her before this life killed her. He knew Sadie would say exactly the same. If it was a few lean months after this between the debt and supporting Karen until she got on her feet again, they’d manage. Go find some bounties, or they’d take extra night watch shifts, round up and tame some horses, work overnight at the saloon, or any number of other things they could scrape together. She was the first of the gang he’d seen since Beaver Hollow, and the one he’d worried about most besides. No chance in hell was he abandoning her, letting this chance to do right by her and help her pass by. He couldn’t help her then, as broken and sick and lost as he’d been himself. He could now. He’d said it rightly. She was his sister, every bit as much as John had been--still was--his brother.

That smile turned even wider. “Oh, no, no. Señor Griffith. You said it yourself. Some things a man shouldn’t be able to buy. He’s got to be willing to get his hands dirty.”

He stared, incredulous. Bit back the instinctive snarled, _You son of a bitch._ But he’d bound himself with those words, sure enough, and walked right into this particular snare. Couldn’t take them back. So all he had to do was go beat, or kill, or whatever, this Fortuna who’d pissed off Montoya. Buy Karen’s safety in someone else’s blood, and a man who might well be innocent and just have pissed off the wrong jackass who had the power to wield to see him suffer. 

The man he’d been would go do it. Or more likely, he’d pull his gun and take care of the problem right here by putting a bullet in Montoya’s smirking face, and be damned if it led to a shootout. There had to be some other way. “Sure. And would there be any other, ah, ways of satisfying that need for getting my hands dirty than dealing with this Fortuna?” Dear God, what would the man ask for next? Being a procurer and stealing a girl to replace Karen, delivering her into this?

Montoya chuckled indulgently, knowing full well he had the upper hand and obviously enjoying it. “See, I have no wish for us to be enemies. It’s clear you have your principles. So, you seem like a man who can fight. Tomas!” The hired man came back from carefully watching Karen and Sadie. “You’ll fight Griffith here.” He nodded to Arthur. “You win, you win your delightful sister. You lose, your sister stays here.” He eyed Tom. “You win, you’ll see a nice bonus. You lose, clearly I need a new right hand man.” 

“ _Jefe_ ,” Tomas protested, eyeing him in astonishment. “I been loyal, never gave you no cause for--”

“If you can’t beat this man,” Montoya said, eyeing him sharply, “you’re not much use to me. I’d sooner uncover that inability now than when it truly matters.”

He almost laughed at that, a harsh and painful laugh, because Dutch hadn’t ever said those exact words. But he might as well have said it, over and over. _If you can’t beat this man, if you can’t rob this bank, if you can’t do everything I demand of you, you’re not much use to me._ Poor bastard. This Tomas was the tool of a man who wouldn’t care to see him broken and discarded. Done probably more than his fair share of things he’d closed his eyes to, and tried to forget, and excuse, and justify as necessary. Just like the man Arthur had used to be, not nearly long enough ago.

Tomas’s mouth tightened into a thin line of discontent, but he nodded, just once, undoing his gun belt. Knowing he was fighting for his job, his livelihood. So this was happening. He’d have to win this fight, and then figure out how the hell to extract himself from a likely offer of becoming Montoya’s new pet, because he’d be damned before he hitched himself to the whims of another self-absorbed maniac. “Fine,” he said curtly, taking off his hat and putting it on the table, reaching for the buckle of his own gun belt.

Sadie came over then, seeing the developing fight. He glanced over to see Karen passed out in the corner. “What exactly are you doing?” She kept her voice low.

“He won’t take money, so apparently I’m fighting his dogsbody, who’s gonna be coming for me snorting fire cause now his job’s on the line. And hoping it amuses him enough to let Karen go.” He pulled his shirt off, over his head, not bothering to unbutton it beyond the first few buttons already undone in the heat. Untied his kerchief too, laying that aside.

She nodded, quickly understanding the situation. Her hand lighted on his arm, a reassuring touch. She tried to lighten it with humor. “You pulling that shirt off to give me a show here? Didn’t have to, you know. Could have waited till we got home.”

He wished he could laugh, but this was no time for it. She hadn’t seen men like this, places like this. No rules given, so this was serious, could end with either of them dead. So he could only answer her with grim honesty. He’d seen how prize fights worked as a boy in the alleys and smoky bars and back rooms of San Francisco. Men not paying attention to their wallets, often drunk--prime pickpocket opportunities. Plus Dutch had fought him a few times, back in the day, as part of some kind of scam. “No. A fight like this, you take your shirt off so your opponent can’t grab it and haul you around like a rag doll.”

Something fierce and hard entered her eyes then, all attempt at humor gone. Her hand went from his arm, gripping the back of his neck, pulling him down to her. She touched her forehead to his. “Then you do what you gotta do, and you _win_ , all right? I’ll be watching. I don’t trust him.”

He nodded in acknowledgment of that, strangely comforted by knowing she’d keep a keen eye on things. “It goes wrong, you get yourself out of here. Karen too, if you can.”

She shot him a look, and he knew she wouldn’t. But he had to say it anyway. He turned towards Tomas, seeing he’d been smart enough to take off his own shirt. So he’d seen enough of these prize fights too, watched Montoya referring to fighting men as his “dogs”. That said plenty. “Don’t suppose it’d help to point out your _jefe_ is a jackass, that you know it, and it’s best that you walk away from this?”

He saw the look in the man’s eyes for a split second. That knowing he was sunk in too deep, lost and conflicted, but damned if he could see a way to do otherwise. “Saved your life, did he? Or something like? The man don’t own you. You don’t owe him. Whatever you already done by his orders, no point in making it worse.”

Bill and Javier hadn’t been able to listen, too caught up in fear and loyalty. His old self wouldn’t have listened either, too scared to acknowledge the truth, and so choosing to ignore it for far, far too long. It came as no surprise to him to see Tomas’ expression harden, those dark eyes going hot with anger. He knew damn well, deep down, in his heart of hearts. He just couldn’t openly accept it, resolve that war within him, and accept the burden of intending on doing something about his past sins in letting himself be used as he had. It was too much like staring at a ghost of his old self. “Shut _up_ ,” Tomas snapped, throwing the first punch.

He wasn’t quite back to his full strength yet, but hopefully close enough. The two of them were roughly of a size, Tomas built even broader, so it came as no shock that he fought like a big man. Thunderous punches, all devastating power. Light on his feet, for all that, but largely moving only to plant his feet again and try to deal out another crushing knockout blow. 

He didn’t fight like that himself. He’d learned young how to take a hit from his miserable bastard of a father, and keep going despite the pain, because Lyle Morgan wouldn’t stand for failure or quitting or crying. He’d learned to brawl in those dark, wet, rancid-smelling San Francisco alleys and abandoned buildings as the one at disadvantage, because an eleven-year-old boy was smaller and weaker than most of the other street brats. Finding out how to take on older, bigger boys and win, by evasion, by tiring them out, by finding their unguarded spots, and mostly by being damn well unwilling to quit. Fighting smart, and utterly ruthlessly. 

Fighting every day damn for a while before he and Benji found each other, until the other boys knew to not mess with Arthur Morgan. Because even if he didn’t win, he scared the hell out of them by sheer stupid tenacity. He’d gotten jumped once by three older boys at once, scrapping over a score from a lady dropping her handbag that he’d scooped up and run with before she could catch him. They’d cornered him in an alley. _Little bastard don’t quit,_ one of them said, looking down at Arthur lying there on the ground, struggling to get up again. _Kid, don’t get up. C’mon._ He’d kept getting up, until he physically couldn’t anymore. A week later, once he could move again without searing pain, he’d proceeded to find them and fight them, one by one, and win. Teaching them who they’d meddled with, and to think twice on it in the future. 

That was who he’d been, feral and furious and damn near fearless, because there was no room for fear or doubt or introspection when it was all about the fight for survival, day by day. Hesitation meant the difference between life and death. That was the boy Hosea and Dutch had found and taken in, refining the crude material of him into something more than a half-wild little bastard running mostly on instinct and rage. They’d taught him to _think_ , most of all.

But the fury was still there, and the determination to not give in, something forged hard as steel within him. It had carried him up a mountainside on that border between Ambarino and New Hanover, between living and dying, and kept him fighting Micah knowing damn well it would be the last thing he’d do. Sent him crawling for that gun with the last few feeble flickers of his strength, unwilling to stop fighting until he couldn’t. Because he couldn’t do otherwise.

The rage was there right now, the same rage he’d had since he was a child at a world that looked at him, looked at others, and carelessly turned away with a shrug, or a grimace of disgust. Said they didn’t matter as much as the _right_ people, they were weak, stupid, inferior, whatever excuse to not do the first thing to help them in their plight. The worst ones used the power they had to keep their boot on other peoples’ necks, exploit whatever they could from them, and once there was nothing left to take, throw them away as carelessly as a squeezed orange. Montoya was like that, and Tomas had loyally helped it happen.

So as he evaded another hard right jab, he went for the weak spot he’d found. “You like being your master’s dog? I see how it is. He calls, you come. Probably shit on command too.” Tomas’ snarl of rage was the only reply at that, and he spent a little too long watching to see if it had effect and he could keep trying that path, because he didn’t move quite fast enough, and caught most of Tomas’ next right directly in his ribs, and the full force of the follow-up left to his face.

Snapping his jaw shut as it did, he caught some of his cheek between his teeth. It had been a while since he’d had that rusty iron taste in his mouth, but he hadn’t forgotten it. He spat the blood on the floor with casual disdain to mingle with the other dark stains there, then laughed, grinned over at Tomas. “That all you got, boy?” Hosea and Dutch both taught him the flair of theatrics, but he’d learned them when it came to brawls long before he’d ever met the two con men who’d changed his life. 

There it was. Another flicker of wariness, looking at this crazy bastard who took a hit like that and laughed about it. He came at Arthur then in earnest, a whirlwind of blows, and he managed to block or evade some, but others inevitably made it through. It didn’t matter. Caught up in the fight, he could manage the pain. Getting in his own blows, trying his best to use that anger within him towards Montoya as fuel. Not as poorly as he had before, letting his temper got the better of him. That had left him doing things like nearly beating that poor bastard Tommy Lindow to death needlessly, giving way to blind, reckless rage. He’d try to use it as a keen edge rather than a blunt hammer. 

But TB meant he wasn’t what he once had been. Maybe he never would be again. He could feel the fatigue starting to pull at him, and so being a stubborn bastard and outlasting his opponent’s threshold of either energy or pain wouldn’t work. He saw an opening and went for it, diving under Tomas’ guard and going for his legs, taking him down to the ground.

Then it was nothing nice, nothing pretty, just two men shoving and wrestling on that dirty tavern floor, and trying to pin each other so they could finish the job. He swore he could _feel_ the ebb of his strength, fighting a rising edge of panic at it. Mustering one last burst of energy, he reversed Tomas’ attempted grapple and rolled the two of them, bumping into a table as he did so, but that didn’t matter. Getting on top, straddling the man’s chest, he got his a hit squarely in the other man’s nose first, feeling the grinding pop of it breaking.

“That bastard ain’t worth dying for,” he said, keeping his words low given the two of them were that close together, “just give up, damn you, give up and you’ll be free of him already.” Like pleading with his former stupid self, knowing there was no way he could beat the man into surrender. He saw that look in his eyes, the grit of a man who’d never admit he was beaten. He’d either see sense and give up because the fight wasn’t worth it, or Arthur would have to knock him out. 

“You stupid _puto_ ,” Tomas managed, words gurgling a bit as the blood from his broken nose trickled down into his throat, flailing one hand and trying to hit back even now, “I lose, I’m a dead man.” Whether he meant by Montoya’s hand, or the removal of his protection and the resulting vengeance of the townspeople, Arthur wasn’t sure, but either way, he had a point.

He was saved from having to puzzle that one over more and find a solution by the sound of a gun, loud as thunder, behind him, and he flinched, waiting for the pain. He should have figured Montoya couldn’t be trusted, that he’d seen the fight was going sour and he’d take matters into his own hands.

But the pain didn’t come, and he couldn’t look back and risk giving Tomas that advantage, but he knew those footsteps approaching behind him. Then Sadie appeared by his side, cocking the hammer of her revolver, spinning it to another chamber, pointing it down at Tomas. “Your piece of shit boss is dead,” she told him. “So you might as well give up.”

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Charles to Sadie and Arthur**  
My friends,  
Congratulations to you both. It’s very good to hear things are going so well for you. Believe me that I wish you every happiness. After the time we was all caught up in, it lifts the heart to hear some of us got a better life in the end. You two deserve it.

Though sad to say, Sadie, it seems I remain a bachelor myself for the time being. I had hoped things might bear some fruit with Wears Great Medicine, a woman of the tribe, but it seems the likes of me cannot compete with Paytah. Though it ain’t fair for me to put it like that. She was no fickle thing only waiting to see which of us might make the better bet. She followed her heart and she chose and I ought to respect that. It stings a bit still, that’s all. In the past a woman’s parents would arrange her marriage for her but the tribe has changed with the times, and the devastation of too many families. So a Wapiti bride now goes only where she gives herself. I cannot think that’s a bad thing.

My life here is a pretty good one, Arthur, so don’t you worry so much. Things are largely quiet, and peaceful. It ain’t the Wapiti’s homeland but it makes for a less bleak place than the Grizzly Valley reservation was. I fish and hunt. I help the elders. I teach reading and writing, though now that we have been here and make it clear we will stay, there comes more talk of the children needing to be in a “proper” school taught by a white person. While I have my own cabin I rarely lack for invitations to share someone else’s hearth for dinner, so I am rarely lonely. 

You would like this place. Your invitation to visit for the winter is a kind one and I am eager to see both of you but you know how things is. They need me and winter is the harshest time to boot so getting away for a long while is no easy thing. Knowing you two, you understand that. I hope to see you here someday, and welcome you to my home. You’re family, after all.

Fond regards,  
Charles


	31. Chuparosa II: The Lost and the Found II

When she’d glanced up from Karen to see Arthur pulling off his shirt, Sadie went to go see what the situation was, taking it lightly enough. Been ready to make another joke after the one about him putting on a show about how she was glad she hadn’t visibly marked up his back with her fingernails this morning, but she’d realized quickly enough this was no time for it when Arthur answered her attempt at humor with honesty as cutting as an axe-stroke. This was no tussle, annoying but overall good-natured, for the amusement of an idiot preening himself like a petty king. This wasn’t going to end with first blood, or a few good punches. A fight where a man took his shirt off so he couldn’t be grabbed and yanked around likely had no rules.

Montoya meant business with this little attempt to goad Arthur. Well, so did she. This went poorly, to hell with any notion of honor. She’d kill Montoya and his pet and anyone else trying to keep them from getting out with Karen, because this could have all been settled with some money and they’d have been gone and away. If Montoya thought she’d stand by and watch another husband of hers killed in front of her eyes by cruel bastards, they damn well had another thing coming. 

She kept her hands from the butts of her revolvers, though, not wanting to give that sign that she was ready and on edge, something about this keeping her wary and watchful. Folding her arms across her chest, she glanced over at Karen, slumped now in her chair. Sighed to herself, trying to think this over. Montoya, his man Tomas, the bartender, another woman busy sweeping the floor, and that was it. Everyone else had apparently been with Luis, the foreman at Don Miguel’s other turquoise mine, or cleared out at the sign of trouble.

There had to be another exit, towards the back. If Arthur was in shape to run, so be it, though Karen being barely conscious didn’t help. But the moment shooting started, would people come running? She didn’t know. 

No time to think, or fear too much, or dwell a lot on Karen being here, the state she was in, and everything she must have been through in the past year and a half since Sadie woke up at Beaver Hollow to find the younger woman gone in the night. 

So she watched the fight, trying to keep as calm and as ready as she could. Arthur was more than holding his own. No surprise he made a capable brawler, a big man like that, and from what he’d told her of his childhood before Dutch, he’d likely had to fight constantly from the time he was tiny. Living on the street from the time he was eleven--she’d pitied Jake so much, losing his father at twelve, his mother at fifteen. But at least he’d had the Adlers to take him in, and their love, and he’d had parents who loved him. He’d had Sadie’s shoulder to cry on that evening after William Adler’s funeral, even as small as she'd been, only seven. 

There had been nobody there for Arthur. No love, no kindness, no hope, for so long. All he’d had to survive off of was the sheer fury of someone who’d been hurt while helpless, determined to never be that way again, and she could see that anger there in him even now, intense and white-hot. Hit right in the face, head snapping back from it, and his only response was to laugh, spit out the blood, and taunt Tomas with casual disdain. A big, burly, furious man would have scared the shit out of plenty of people in his day, and he must have used that to advantage. She’d known he had a temper on him, seen bits and edges of it here and there, even if she hadn’t fully felt the force of it until now, almost incandescent. But somehow, seeing Arthur filled to the brim with his anger didn’t frighten her. She’d felt that same fire coursing beneath her own skin, pain and power both, after Jake’s murder, after her own ordeal. She’d turned it on any O’Driscoll she could, willing to let it burn them to ash. That rage was the only thing that all at once both kept her going and consumed her, until she’d finally realized after Hanging Dog Ranch exactly what a monster she’d become and gotten a bridle on it. She’d finally become her anger’s master, rather than the other way around. She expected Arthur had faced that same crossroads, and made that same choice. Suspected it was only willpower and that passion that had carried him all the way up Bluestone Ridge and let him fistfight a man who was healthy, and somehow fight him to a draw, right on the edge of dying. 

Though she was used to sensing when he pushed himself too hard, familiar by now with the signs he’d started to hit his limits. She’d watched for it carefully for months now. It usually came in a more pleasant context these days, though, caught up in yet another round of lovemaking for the day, her teasingly telling him to roll over, lay back, and let her do the work this time. She saw those tells now, the two men caught in a furious whirlwind of blows, grapples, blocks, and the like, seeing Arthur start to fall just a bit behind, less agile and swift, ducking blows rather than stepping aside from them, chest heaving, spitting more blood on the floor.

Her eyes went to it. He wasn’t wheezing or coughing, and there were no green or yellow streaks of pus in it either. So it wasn’t tearing open old lesions in his lungs, but all the same, a shudder went down her spine. She’d watched him hacking up blood for far too long, from Beaver Hollow to Wapiti to those early months at Las Hermanas, disease dangling him over the cliff’s edge and ready to let him drop, to not have a visceral reaction to the sight, even if it had nothing to do with TB. His exhaustion could lay blame there, though.

Arthur must have sensed that he was reaching the end of his strength himself, because with one last desperate burst, he took Montoya’s man down to the ground, wrestling him into submission eventually, and laying into him even harder. It was clear he had the fight well in hand.

Montoya saw it too, and she saw him reach for the gun belt Tomas had left on the table, sliding one gun carefully from its holster. Probably expecting she was too busy watching Arthur to notice. She gave him no chance to do more than that, and with a quick draw, a single shot, Montoya’s blood and brains decorated the already-stained floor.

With a quick glance towards the bartender, seeing no reaction from him, she walked towards Arthur, still on top of Tomas, and cocked the revolver to the next chamber. Tomas still stared at her, defiance in his blue eyes, refusing to surrender. Arthur sighed, a heavy, tired sound. “ _Really_ now? Damn fool.” He punched Tomas one more time in the jaw, and that was that, the man going limp and unconscious on the floor. Arthur got off him, pushing up from the floor a little unsteadily, taking to his second try to get to his feet. She went to him, getting close, looking him over. He’d have his share of bruises, that was for sure. He’d been hit in the head and the face, she knew that, but his eyes focused on her clearly enough. That was a good sign. Mostly he just needed to rest, and catch his breath. She hooked the leg of a chair with her foot, pulling it closer, pointing at it. “Sit down, Arthur.”

He shook his head, leaning hard against the table, one hand bracing himself there. “Sadie.” He waved a hand tiredly in the general direction of Karen, Tomas, and Montoya’s shattered head, fallen down to the table. 

“Sit your ass down before you fall down,” she told him, brooking no argument. “I got this.” She handed him his shirt, glad he’d thrown his things, guns included, on the next table over from Montoya, clearly not trusting the man.

He nodded, sitting down with a heavy _thunk_ of the chair legs scraping against the floor as he sat back. “Montoya went for the gun?” he asked, looking up at her, hand against his jaw, prodding a rising bruise.

“Yeah.” He nodded at that, and reached for the bottle of tequila, taking a swig. Grimacing as it hit whatever cut or the like had caused him to bleed. Deciding he’d be all right, more or less, once he caught his breath, she eyed the front door, still seeing nobody racing in to answer the gunshot. Heading over to the bar, she caught the bartender’s eye. “You get gunplay in this tavern often, Señor...?”

“Avila,” he replied. “Sometimes, yes. Particularly where Señor Montoya was in a mood.” He stared right back at her. “So, you’ve shot the _jefe_ dead.” 

From his tone, the bastard wasn’t going to be mourned one bit. “You’re welcome.”

Avila gave a half-shrug, and went back to polishing glasses. “I didn’t say I thanked you for it, señora.”

“We got rid of a problem for you, seems like.”

He gave a snort of derisive amusement. “You got rid of a cruel bastard, sure. But you didn’t give a shit about any of this until your sister was involved, though, did you? And now you’ll ride out of town and congratulate yourselves on meddling in the lives of us poor helpless little _Mexicanos_. Just like every other American.”

She had to admit that caught her aback. “Look, Montoya asked us here, we didn’t come to meddle. You rather we left him alive? Seems like he’s got you in a shitty deal here.”

“No doubt. But now we get to explain to Don Miguel exactly how his overseer came to end up dead on the floor of the tavern. And hope that he doesn’t decide to pick some of us to kill for insurrection. Or send someone even worse.” He explained it to her with the excessive patience of someone breaking something obvious down to the level of someone incredibly stupid.

“That can’t--” She shook her head, dumbfounded. Things couldn’t work like that, could they? The damn hidalgo couldn’t come and just massacre his entire workforce if he was pissed.

They’d told her all along, though. _You don’t understand how things work in Mexico._ Stories Javier told around the campfire, about beatings, executions, castrations, misery and suffering and helplessness. She just hadn’t listened. 

She swallowed hard, finally seeing it, feeling stupid that she hadn’t. She and Arthur hadn’t been out into the villages like this all that much, and they hadn’t seen the worst. Of course. People put on good behavior for Americans. Montoya’s eagerness to impress Americans, to appeal to their coming into Mexico, fit, didn’t it? But he’d gotten sloppy once playing nice didn’t work and she and Arthur told him to take his would-be contract and shove it. It was only a monster like Montoya who got reckless enough to put assertion of his power above keeping the status quo hidden from those who might be shocked, and actually be able to do something about it.

It wasn’t so simple as killing Montoya and making them free, was it? She couldn’t regret killing the son of a bitch, but things got complicated. And Avila was right. She’d been prepared to get Arthur, get Karen, and leave them to deal with it, figuring the corpse really wasn’t her problem. “It’s our mess,” she acknowledged. “We’ll handle it.” She wasn’t sure how, but fair was fair.

“Good. Then we’ll keep it quiet and cover both our tracks, ” Avila answered. “You don’t want Don Miguel pissed off at you either, I expect. He has...considerable resources, from what I understand.”

At least he respected her enough to be honest. She had to admit only the fact the situation had them in its jaws and he could mess them up with it if he chose gave him the courage, but she had to admire it all the same. She nodded at that, feeling another shiver work its way down her spine, sensing the delicate balance here. Handle it wrong, and everyone could be in danger. She turned away to think. Heading back to Arthur, she sat down in a chair beside him. He’d gotten to the point of getting his shirt on, and half-buttoned, so that was an improvement. “We got a problem.”

He eyed her with a wry kind of amusement. “Well, I expect us walking in here and killing the boss wasn’t going to go over too well.”

“What, you’d rather I sat and watched while he shot you in the back? Or walked out of here without Karen, at that?”

He raised a hand in a sign of peace, quelling her irritation. “Not a bit.”

“Good. But we gotta fix this. So Don Miguel don’t come after folk here, or after us. We meddled in their business, put them at risk with this. We gotta take care of it.”

Chin propped in his hand, he thought about that for a minute. “Count us fortunate folk, for once, for them Del Lobos. Dump a body out in the desert, claim in a week or so that we run across it, nobody’s the wiser.” He turned, wincing only a little, towards the bartender. “Hey, Mister--”

“Avila,” she supplied in an undertone.

“Avila,” Arthur repeated. “Did Montoya here ever take trips out?”

“Frequently,” Avila said dryly. “He was heading for Mexico City this very afternoon for a week or so, to make his report to Don Miguel. Or the Don’s men, most likely, as I understand it.” He gave a swift shrug. “Or anyway, that’s what he said he was doing. More likely to go whoring for half of that, knowing him. I expect he figured you would handle whatever he hired you to do, and report back and be paid when he returned.”

So much like most bartenders, Avila knew too much of everyone’s business. “Who watched the place while he was gone?” she asked him. Sounded like Montoya took off a fair bit.

Avila gestured towards the unconscious man on the floor. “His brother, Señor Perez. The loyal hound.” He spat the last words, face twisting in a sudden fierce rage.

She felt something change in Arthur. “His brother, you say,” he said, and she heard the sad, almost resigned note in his voice at it.

“Half brother,” Avila confirmed. 

“Montoya’s daddy come from some money, and Perez’ momma was a _campesina_ he got pregnant, was she?” Arthur asked. Avila nodded, an arched eyebrow saying he was apparently impressed at Arthur’s deductive skills. 

Arthur gave another low sigh. “The things we do for family,” he said, mostly to himself. She couldn’t help but see it now. Tomas Perez had blue eyes, like Montoya’s. A bastard born to a local woman, born with nothing, and expected to give absolute loyalty to his father, and then his half-brother, in gratitude for being raised above the masses. Probably doing things he knew he shouldn’t, in order to not be cast out again, or to disappoint. She closed her eyes for a moment herself, wanting to reach for Arthur’s hand, to reassure him, but holding back, knowing it would come across too much as apparent weakness right now when they needed to be steady. Arthur raised his voice again, questioning Avila, “Was he just Montoya’s loyal right hand? Or did he--encourage it? Do anything on his own?” 

Now there was a steely anger in Avila’s voice. “Ask my wife. Ask Teresa. She caught his eye. He saw from Señor Montoya that he could have what he wanted. Who he wanted. So he did.” He gestured to the woman sweeping the floor. “She wasn’t the first, neither. Or the last.”

The fury flared to life inside of her, and she was tempted to go put a bullet in the bastard’s skull herself right then and there. “That’s that, then,” she said. There could be some second chances. He’d fought so hard himself to earn one. But there was a difference between doing some terrible things as the follower of a bad man, and deciding to enjoy having a share of that power by deliberately abusing people with it. That was a line that couldn’t ever be crossed back, so far as she was concerned. There was no forgiveness in her either for a man who abused women or children, for that matter, and she suspected Arthur felt the same.

Arthur got up slowly, pulling one of his revolvers from its holster. He moved with more tension and hesitation now, like the pain was suddenly more than a fistfight, because it had to be. She’d sensed he had to see something of himself in Tomas Perez, some kind of dark mirror. She could do it for him, could easily put him down and not think too much of it, because she had no mercy in her for that kind of man. But somehow she suspected it was something he had to face and do himself, or else he’d never be able to cope with it.

He surprised her, though, by going first to Teresa Avila, not to where the unconscious Perez still lay on the floor. She paused, leaning her broom against the bar, and turned to him, watchful and careful. He turned the revolver around in his hand with a neat flick of his wrist, offering her the butt of the gun, holding it by the barrel. “Shall I kill him for you, señora?” he asked, a solemn formality to his words, something that struck Sadie with the picture of a knight of long ago offering to go fight in a lady’s name. “Or would you rather do it yourself?” 

She looked at him, looked at the gun, astonished. Obviously not expecting that a man would offer her the chance to take her own justice, that it was men’s business dealing with what was done to women. For a moment, Sadie thought she saw a slight smile of something like gratitude, and a small nod of respect towards Arthur. She reached out for a moment, as if she’d take the gun, and then shook her head, drawing her hand back. “He made me a whore for a time, but he can’t make me a killer for the rest of my days,” she said, and Sadie could hear the determination there. “And I don’t need to dirty my hands for vermin. He’s _nothing_ to me. He’s a bad memory, that’s all. So you go and get rid of him, señor.” She pushed the gun back towards Arthur. “For me and the others too.”

It wasn’t the choice Sadie had made herself when it came to Tom Watkins, but she had to respect it. There was more than one way to deal with the anger, and deciding to cut him out of her life as much as possible, to make him nothing, that didn’t make Teresa Avila weak. She’d seen killing the man brought some satisfaction, but it hadn’t been the catharsis she’d thought it would be. She still couldn’t regret it, and she was grateful to Arthur for his help there, and for letting her handle the fat bearded shit herself, knowing she’d needed to do it, that she’d needed his support but not his overbearing protection. Just like he’d known here that Señora Avila needed him to hand over that power to her, let her choose and command, rather than having men just decide things for her once again. 

Arthur nodded, heading towards Perez. Stood there, lining up his shot calmly enough, and then it was done. One neat bullet hole between the eyes, and more blood on the floor, mingling with stains already there from Montoya’s fights and whatever else. He stared down at Perez’s body for a long moment, his face expressionless, his jaw set tight, and then he turned away, reaching for his gun belt to put the gun back in its holster and buckle it back on. As before, nobody came to see what happened that there had been another shot in the tavern. That fact chilled her to the core of her bones. Maybe they’d meddled, but she had to think things had to _somehow_ improve by getting rid of a maniac like that. 

They rode out of Tesoro Azul fifteen minutes later with two blanket-wrapped bundles slung over Montoya and Perez’s horses, Karen in front of Sadie on Bob, still barely stirring. The Avilas handled it, telling the gate guards they saw nothing, that Montoya and Perez were leaving for Mexico City as planned. 

She and Arthur said nothing to each other as they headed east, to a lonely stretch of the desert near where Punta Orgullo turned to Perdido, and left the two corpses there for the coyotes and vultures and desert sun. She couldn’t even feel guilty about that. Like the O’Driscolls up in Pinetree Gulch, they deserved no better than to be carrion. Removed the tack from the two men’s horses, with its identifiable Del Rey crest embossed into the leather of saddle and bridle both, and shooing them away into the desert. Either they’d join the mustang herds and run wild, or they’d make their way to civilization eventually, just two free and unidentifiable horses turned up as fortunate happenstance. 

They’d agreed upon the plan with the Avilas, covering everyone’s asses safely. They would come riding back to Tesoro Azul in two weeks, having been on their way to report to Montoya and collect their pay, they would “find” the bodies in the desert slaughtered by Del Lobos, ready to report the unfortunate news to the miners, and help complete the ruse. Write Don Miguel with the sad tidings, because two Americans who’d been hirelings for Montoya reporting it would seem far more innocent than his own workers doing so. All in all, they would clean up the mess. Do all the things that covered up a pair of killings, however justified, because it was doubtful Don Miguel would see it that way. It hurt still to think that no matter how much good it probably did to see men like that out of the world, they maybe hadn’t helped the bigger picture by it. It was all part of a system she was beginning to realize she hadn’t truly seen or understood, no matter that she’d lived here in Mexico a year and a half now. Maybe she’d never truly be able to see it like people who’d been born and raised here, suffered under it. 

Karen groggily stirred a little but then slumped into unconsciousness again as Arthur took her on Buell next, to give Bob a break. “Home?” he said finally, the first word he’d spoken to her since they’d left that tavern, his voice rough with exhaustion.

“Home,” she acknowledged, turning Bob towards the east again. Overhead, a vulture already swooped low in curiosity to inspect the bodies. She didn’t look back again. “We best get Felipe once we get Karen put to bed.”

“What you mean by that?” 

“Swanson...saw how bad things was, after the bank job went wrong. He told Charles and me he’d gone off the opium and the liquor, so he could help. But it went bad for him the next day. He was shaking and sweating and puking and crying out in pain. He asked us to gag him, cause we was hiding out in the bayou after we left Shady Belle.” That was maybe the first moment she’d really begun to have a spark of respect for the man, thinking about everyone else’s safety, even in the depths of his suffering. “But it just about killed him. Trelawney and me had to bring him to St. Denis to the doctor.” Trelawney knew the city, and she’d been able to show her face there too, unlike Charles. She shook her head. “Didn’t think much of the doctor, but he was the best we had just then, hiding in the swamps as we was. Took Swanson near a week to get past it, and back on his feet. If Karen’s getting off the bottle, best we make sure she’s safe.” 

His gaze on her face for a moment, Arthur nodded. “All right.” He tightened his arm around Karen, nudging Buell into a trot.

Back in Chuparosa, they got Karen upstairs, into the small bed in the spare bedroom. Pulling her boots off, getting her legs up on the bed and seeing the holes in her stockings that the Karen she’d known at Horseshoe and Clemens wouldn’t have tolerated, she looked at Arthur. “You want to stay with her while I get Felipe? If she comes to, she shouldn’t be alone, and in a strange place. And you known her longer than me.” Not to mention he could still do with more rest himself, to judge from the tired sag of his shoulders.

He nodded at that, sitting down in a chair beside the bed, eyes on Karen’s face. He reached out and brushed one stray lock of hair out of her face. Sadie headed downstairs, out of the house, to Felipe’s office. Had to wait a few minutes while he tended to Esteban, and she didn’t really want to know what for, because some things she just didn’t need to know about her neighbors. But when he was free, he came back to the front room where he’d bid her to wait. “Something wrong with Arthur?” he guessed. “Or,” a slight, cheerfully knowing smile, “are you asking if there’s happy news? It’s a bit early to know yet.”

“I know that,” she said, unable to help being a bit defensive. She’d had cause to wonder, though. She hadn’t had her bleeding time since they’d gotten married and she’d put that sponge away, though she was sometimes a bit erratic on it anyway. But she’d been tired too. Though that could be the fact she and Arthur were newly married, all that desire finally unleashed. She and Jake had been pleasantly exhausted too for those first couple of months. It was too early to tell, but oh, how she wanted to hope, and didn’t want to, because she wasn’t sure she could bear the disappointment. She and Jake hadn’t been scrupulous about that sponge every single time, and they’d done other things, him pulling out of her before his pleasure caught him up and the like, but there had been a couple times she’d skipped a cycle, and started to vaguely both hope and dread. But it always came back, and so nothing had come of it. There was no reason just yet to get excited. It would be another month or more before she knew anything for certain, wouldn’t it? “It ain’t that, anyway. It’s...Arthur’s sister.”

“Tuberculosis?” he said.

“No. She…” She sighed. Best stick to the bones of the story she’d overheard Arthur telling back in the Tesoro Azul tavern, because it was the truth, even if not all of it. “It was a bad year in ‘99. Arthur got the TB, and Karen, she lost her sweetheart. He got shot one fine summer day, just walking down the street, talking and joking with his pals. Arthur included. She started drinking. I couldn’t…” She looked down at her hands, shrugging helplessly. “Arthur and me, you know how bad off he was when he got here, and we was dealing with so much already,” she admitted, feeling the guilt break over her all the same. “She run off that fall. Arthur especially, he always worried, but we was lucky. We found her just today. Brought her to our house. She’s drunk still. And I had an uncle who got caught up in the bottle, real bad. When he finally saw sense and stopped all that, we had to take him to the doctor. He was...” She looked at Felipe. She hadn’t told Arthur the worst of it. “Seeing things that wasn’t there. Screaming. Trying to claw his own skin off saying there was things crawling under there. Begging us for a drink. Begging us to kill him.” 

“It’s not pretty when a drunkard finally puts away the bottle,” he said, lifting his brown leather bag, held in his left hand. “So let’s see what I can do.”

“Thank you, Felipe,” she said, touching his arm as she moved past him, heading out the door. “You’re a good doctor. A good friend, too.” He nodded at that, smiling that slight smile of his, holding the door for her.

Heading back to the house, she heard Karen’s raised voice the moment she hit the front door, and saw Dusty hiding under the kitchen table. “Guess she’s up.” She paused at the foot of the stairs, shooting Felipe an apologetic smile. “Sorry. Real talent for stating the obvious. I get it from Arthur.” Might as well try to lighten the moment while she could.

“...just _fine_ until you two showed up.”

She heard the heat of temper flaring readily in Arthur’s sarcastic answer. “Oh, sure, you was so fine if you’d lit a cigarette it’d turn you into a firebreather fit for a circus, just about!”

“Like you’re one to talk, Arthur Morgan, you son of a bitch! We all saw you stumbling into camp drunk as a skunk often enough.”

She glanced over at Felipe, well aware the man had heard the name, and he must have questions. “Uh…”

Felipe raised an eyebrow, and stepped into the room. “Hello, Señorita Griffith,” and Sadie didn’t think it was her imagination there was a slight emphasis on the surname.

“It’s Jones, mister,” Karen said, staring at him, obviously still a bit tipsy from the bleary, squinting focus of her eyes.

“Wonderful.” Somehow, the man managed to coax Karen to relax. Sitting in the chair Arthur vacated, he looked at Karen, explaining the situation. “Your family has been very concerned about you. Your going missing and all, and then your drinking.”

“Sure, and a sober life is going to make me so happy,” she said with a derisive snort.

“You’ll never know if you drink yourself into the grave,” Sadie challenged her. “We survived all of it back in ‘99. Just...let us help you, all right?”

Karen stared at her, then looking away. “Seems like you two are doing OK.” Her gaze flicked down to Arthur’s hand, seeing the wedding ring there, then shot to Sadie’s hand, obviously seeing a different ring from the one she’d had. “So this is your place. You two…?” Her brow furrowed in surprise.

“Early last month, yeah,” Arthur confirmed, and she saw the shy edge of wonder to his smile about it, even now. 

Karen saw it too, saw how it lit up his face, and looked away, but not before Sadie saw the shine of tears in her eyes. She knew full well how seeing others so content and joyful could make the agony feel all the more acute in comparison, and for a moment, she couldn’t help a pang of guilt. But she and Arthur had fought so hard for that happiness, and endured more than their share of pain and misery to get there. “Congratulations, then. Sorry I missed the wedding. Though I probably would have wrecked it with my _firebreather antics_ ,” she shot an irritated glance at Arthur.

Sadie sat down on the bed beside her. “We’d have wanted you there,” she told Karen, daring to reach out and put an arm around her shoulders. “We missed you. Arthur?” She made it clear from her tone there was only one possible answer.

He shot Sadie a magnificently pissed off look of his own, as if offended she’d even consider him saying anything else. He crouched down in front of Karen, getting on her eye level. “Of course. We’re family, Karen. You’re my sister.” 

“You don’t need to be saying it cause you got a friend here,” Karen said angrily, her eyes going to Felipe, standing back a bit, taking in the situation. That goose was well and truly cooked, Sadie judged. They’d better be prepared to give him as much of the truth as he cared to take in, because polite fictions weren’t going to do it this time.

“No lie,” Arthur said. “We’re family,” he repeated it, even more emphatically this time. “We _decided_ we was family, all of us, and nobody’s gonna tell us otherwise. They don’t get to say so. Ain’t blood that matters. I seen blood kin treat folk far worse than we ever did to each other.”

Karen looked at him, then over at Sadie. “So for sure you’re both gonna nag me till I try putting away the liquor,” she said with deadpan humor. “Guess it can’t get much worse than things has been, so why the hell not. Sober better not be boring as shit, though.” There was a slight flicker of mingled hope and shame in those green eyes of hers, rather than the dullness that had been there before. She waved a hand in a too-nonchalant gesture. “All right, Doc, tell me how it’s gonna be.”

Felipe talked about the next few days, and she saw Arthur blanch a bit as he described some of the worst symptoms, the ones she’d seen in Swanson. Karen sat there, listening carefully, showing no sign of any fear, or anything much. Maybe everything was too much still, like it had been for Sadie up in Colter.

Leaving Karen to sleep some more, probably for the best, she smiled as she saw Dusty come into the bedroom, hopping up on the bed beside her. “That’s Dusty. He’ll keep you company, I expect. Scratch his ears and you’ll be best friends.” Dusty snuggled up against Karen, giving a quick thump of his tail. “Dido--she’s the cat--will be along soon enough, once she gets done proving new folk aren’t _that_ interesting to make her come running right away.”

Karen gave a slight smile at that. Felipe looked at Arthur, eyeing the bruises on his face, the stiffness in his movements. “Better get you looked at.” He gestured to Arthur. “Downstairs. More space.” 

She felt a little queasy and lightheaded then herself--too much riding in the sun, probably, distracted with Arthur and Karen. Headed into the bedroom, for the pitcher of water they kept there. Took a good, long drink, and sat down on the bed for a few minutes, until it passed.

Heading downstairs, she paused as she heard Felipe snapping, “You come here with a drunk you’re claiming is your sister that you found _somewhere_ , you’re breathing hard, exhausted, and beaten up, have two cracked ribs, a bruised face, busted knuckles, and you give me flimsy explanations at best? Well, at least you aren’t coughing again, but I suppose I’m lucky you don’t claim you got hurt being thrown from a horse and expect me to believe it!”

She peered around the corner to see Arthur sitting in the chair, finishing tucking in his blue striped shirt again, pulling his suspenders back up onto his shoulders. “Well, what is it you want from me, Felipe?” he asked, tone tired as anything.

“How about some honesty? It’s one thing for you to keep things from me as your doctor, but as your friend? So, you want to explain to me who this Arthur _Morgan_ is?”

She froze, for a split second wondering if she’d have to shoot Felipe while she was at it to protect Arthur, and the moment after, rejecting that notion in horror. It was a thought born out of terror, but there was no chance in hell she could actually do it. Not to the man who’d saved both their lives, and become a friend. Arthur took a few moments before answering. “He was an outlaw. A miserable bastard raised to it from the time he was a kid. Too scared to do anything but follow orders from a man he was dumb enough to love as a father, until it was too late for too many folk. He’s a dead man, Felipe. Pinkertons say they killed him back in ‘99. And the world’s far better without him.”

“I assume he died right around the time you and Sadie showed up in the clinic.”

“About a week before, yes.” Arthur cleared his throat, and she breathed a sigh of relief that it didn’t turn into a cough. “Karen had a bad time of it. That’s true. She lost her man. She was raised in the life, same as me. Both of us pretending it was all we wanted. But that year, ugly as it got, we couldn’t ignore all the cracks in the facade no more. I couldn’t help her then, sick as I was. I gotta try now.”

“I always figured it wasn’t pride pushing you too hard. So it’s atonement, is it? But you can’t live like that. You can’t help people if you’re nearly getting killed.” A harder, sharper edge entered Felipe’s voice now. “You’re still healing, you stubborn bastard. You have a wife now. From what you’ve both said, she watched one husband die already. Don’t make Sadie go through that again.” She closed her eyes, trying to not think about that moment in the tavern she’d wondered if she’d be a widow again, and this time it hadn’t even been nearly three years, but only six weeks.

“I know. I know, I know. Shit, it was Sadie who got me out today when I about got shot in the back. But what was I supposed to do? Leave Karen to drink herself to death? I offered to pay her debts, whatever he wanted. And if bowing and scraping and eating shit would have got her out of there, I would have done it. Pride’s got no place when it comes to saving family. But the stupid fool insisted on blood.” Arthur’s voice took on its own ruthless edge. “So he got it. And I ain’t sorry for that. I was no good man back in my day, but this one? Man was a monster.”

“Do I want to know?”

“Probably better than you don’t. It ain’t that you can’t handle it. But it’s complicated enough already.” Arthur raised his voice. “You can stop skulking round the corner there, Sadie.” She bit back a sigh at that, stepping into the kitchen, wondering how he’d sensed her there.

She looked at Felipe, and gave him a small shrug. “It’s better you know, I suppose. It got harder and harder lying. But it’s a weight to put on someone, telling them.”

Felipe looked back at her with a bland expression. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re talking about, Sadie.”

She gave a soft chuckle, seeing where he was going with this. “So you ain’t never heard the name ‘Arthur Morgan’, huh?”

“Trying to recall, but I’m not sure. Anyone here in Nuevo Paraiso know the man?”

“I believe Mother Calderón might have heard of him. She’s pretty sure we crossed paths before Sadie and me come down to Mexico,” Arthur answered him. 

“Well, all we’ve got here is this colossal fool,” he jerked a thumb towards Arthur, “one Arthur Griffith, who keeps trying to pretend he doesn’t have TB, and therefore is going to _rest up_ for a few days at least.” He raised an eyebrow at her. “And I don’t mean you keeping him in bed with marital intimacies, Sadie.” 

“All right, Doc, all right.” 

“Can I help tend to Karen?” Arthur asked carefully, gesturing upstairs. “Ain’t right to leave all that on Sadie, especially as you say she’s likely to be bad off.”

“That’s fine.” Felipe pushed up from the chair. “I’ve left you some laudanum if she gets truly bad with the pain or inability to sleep, but use it as a last resort. Keep her drinking as much water as you can, because the vomiting’s going to dry her out. For you,” he nodded to Arthur, “use the arnica on those bruises, and if you start coughing, you come see me _immediately_.” He shot a look at Sadie, obviously expecting her to be his co-conspirator in that. She nodded, agreeing to that bargain. “Once she’s through that, we’ll talk about the rest.”

“The rest?” Sadie asked.

“She’s not drinking because she enjoys it. She’s drinking, from what you both say, from pain. From grief. She’ll have to face that. Otherwise, what’s to stop her from just finding the nearest bottle once she’s up out of bed?” He shook his head, glancing around the kitchen, pointing towards a bottle of tequila on the shelf. “I’d hide or get rid of any alcohol in the house, at that, until she’s stronger.”

“Done,” Arthur acknowledged.

Felipe looked at the two of them. “At least she has you. That’ll be the most important thing.”

“Thank you,” she told him. “For everything.” For the care, once again. For his friendship, and showing that he could be trusted with the truth, ugly as it was.

He nodded, then collected his bag, heading for the door. “It’s going to be a long few days,” he told them. “But you managed months and months at Las Hermanas, so if anyone can manage to get her through, I imagine it’s you. Let me know if things are really bad, though.”

He wasn’t joking. Tired as they both were, they skipped dinner, and dropped right off to sleep, only to be woken by Dusty whimpering at their bedside, and then hearing Karen’s swearing and moaning, coming in to find her puking onto the floor, crying and apologizing about it.

She went for a bucket and another pitcher of water to keep in Karen’s room, and Arthur went for some cleaning rags. He came back with them, and a clean shirt of his for Karen to wear besides. She gave him a look of gratitude at that, glad he’d thought of it. He cleaned up the floor, while Sadie kept busy getting Karen undressed, seeing a few fresher-looking scars on her skin, helping pull the shirt on over her head like she was an exhausted child, tying her rumpled blond hair back out of her face.

“You should have left me there,” Karen mumbled, eyes cast down.

“Don’t you talk no nonsense like that, Karen,” Sadie told her, handing her a cup of water.

Arthur threw the cleaning rag into the bucket, maybe a little more forcefully than it needed. “We ain’t Dutch. We don’t leave family behind. And that’s that.” 

Helping her lie back down, Dido finally chose to make her entrance, settling down along with Dusty. “Ah, the queen has arrived,” Arthur said with a laugh. “She’s fickle as anything, except when you’re sick. Took good care of me on the TB ward.”

It came in waves for her, the vomiting and the pain, the begging for a drink to ease all of it, the cursing both of them when they refused, the angry insistence they should have left her. It was no easy thing to listen to Karen’s suffering, just like listening to Arthur’s wet, hacking cough and wheezing breaths at Beaver Hollow had hurt.

Taking a break, they headed out onto the rooftop for some air, sitting there tired as anything. He finally broke the silence first. “Is she as bad off as Swanson was?”

“Not quite. But Swanson had the opium too, and he’d been at it for years and years.”

He reached for her hand, taking hold of it. She laced her fingers through his, careful of his battered and skinned knuckles. “You ain’t never talked about it,” he ventured, bowing his head and leaning forward a bit to meet her eyes. “What happened those weeks we was...away.”

“You ain’t never talked about Guarma. It was things we wanted to forget, and there wasn’t no time to fuss about it, considering what a shitheap we was in at the time.” Except now today, or yesterday, whichever it was by now, he’d said something about Tesoro Azul reminding him of Guarma, with its beaten down and scared people.

But he’d asked, and of all the people in the world, he was the one she could talk about it with. Charles was away in Canada, the rest who knew where, and Karen was in no state to talk about it right now, even if she’d been inclined. “Abigail come back first. Let us know it went wrong, and Hosea had been captured. We was already packing and preparing for getting the hell out when Charles found us, and...well. That was how we heard about Lenny, and Hosea, and John getting captured, and you folk leaving.” Hosea’s capture had been bad enough, and she’d been prepared to wait for Dutch and the rest to come back and presumably figure a rescue out, but Charles had dealt everything a deathblow. 

“I didn’t want to go,” he said, barely above a whisper. “I should have…”

“Don’t,” she told him, shaking her head. “You been beaten up enough for a day without doing it to yourself too. But we knew we was on our own, for now. And Charles and me was the only ones fit to fight. To hunt. To protect folk. We ended up moving all through that night up to Lakay. I’d been hunting up there, knew it was abandoned. Swanson saw how bad it was and got himself sober, and once he was OK, he really stepped up. Susan and Pearson was looking after camp. Even Uncle was helping. Tells you how bad it really was.”

She licked her lips, continuing. “Abigail was frantic over John being captured, and guilty as hell over not being able to spot the trap and save Hosea. Jack cried himself to sleep a lot of nights. Just a scared little boy who’d been through too much already, and now his momma was upset too. Lenny’s killing scared the hell out of Tilly and Mary-Beth. Made them see that being that young was no protection from lawmen’s bullets. I ain’t sure they knew they believed it, but some part of them did, until then. Molly had more or less disappeared. Karen kept drinking more. Charles and me both wanted to help, but...we was so busy trying to keep everyone safe and hid and fed, just the two of us, there was nothing left for anything but survival.” She leaned into him, her head on his shoulder, feeling him lean in too, his forehead touching hers. “Funny thing. It weren’t Dutch that we was missing. None of us wanted more raving schemes about this big future just then. We wanted the folk who _cared_. The ones who would go out of their way to do what needed doing, make even the shit we was in better with some kind words. So it was Hosea we missed, and it was you. Maybe Javier too. And it was hard. So Goddamn hard, Arthur. Charles and me both was struggling. I know he would go to the Wapiti some to get away for a few hours, only so he could bear it. Find some peace so he could come back to camp, do it all over again the next day. Nothing helped me much, then I found a camp with some O’Driscolls. You can guess the rest, just about.”

It helped lance the festering anger within her, both at the O’Driscolls and the helplessness of the situation. So she’d made her own way of coping with all of it, trying to stay sane, hunting O’Driscolls in between providing for the gang, and in doing so, became something even worse than she had been. “It was like I was two people. The one doing everything I could to look after folk, and then some kind of animal out hunting O’Driscolls and enjoying it.”

“Too much got put on you.”

“Guarma?” she asked, tightening her grip on his hand.

“Ship got wrecked in a storm, sank. I got trapped behind some crates when it lurched. Lifeboat was gone when I got on deck.” He let out a tired laugh, though she couldn’t help but note with relief there was no wheeze in it. “Just one more time Dutch left me to die, I suppose. Should have learned. Woke up washed up on a beach. Ended up finding them, we all got captured. Put on a chain gang. Dutch stopped them beating me to death there, so...I don’t know. Maybe he did care. Sometimes. Or maybe it was all for show. Ain't ever gonna know for sure, am I? Anyway. They marched us inland. Intended us for workers on the sugar plantations. Some rebels attacked, set us free. Javier got shot in the leg, captured. We ended up working with the rebels so they'd help us get a boat off the island. I wasn’t feeling so good. But we got Javier back. Dutch...killed an old woman. Strangled her in front of me. For no good reason. Claiming she was gonna betray us, when all she wanted was more gold from him for her help. Greedy, maybe, but that ain’t no death sentence. We got Javier back, and the jackass in charge, Fussar, figured out we was there. Ended up fighting him, and...” 

He sighed, putting an arm around her shoulders, moving closer to her. “They was living like slaves, Sadie, to some petty king. Good folk, brave ones, fighting for their own home. Fussar could have done anything he wanted to them, and did. He hanged men for speaking truth. I saw that. All them things Javier said was true here in Mexico, they was true on Guarma too. And we got here and I thought maybe he was wrong, but he wasn’t. Avila’s right. Them rebels on Guarma was right. The Wapiti was right. It ain’t our land, and we come in, do what we want, mess things up, and leave. Saying we’re making it better for them, but I ain’t sure that’s true. Guarma ain't better off for the Van Der Lindes having been there, not really. And Cornwall Junior and that grand American investment in Mexico ain’t gonna improve things for _campesinos_. Gonna make more money for men who already got more money and power than they know what to do with, that's all.” 

“So what are you saying we do? Start a revolution?”

“We helped the rebels topple Fussar, and what’s that done for them? I read in the papers. The American military looked over from where they took over Cuba that same summer, said there was too much unrest and they was fighting Spain anyway, and they come in and took over Guarma too. Maybe the Army didn’t hang them rebels like the Spanish would, but you can be sure Hercule, Leon, Baptiste and friends ain’t running the show on their own island that they fought to see free.” He sighed, his breath stirring against her hair. “Some folk are made for revolutions, Sadie. Big ideas, philosophy? That’s not me. I’m just a man who hates seeing folk suffer for no Goddamn reason.”

“So you and me care about people, not ideals. That’s no bad thing to be. World needs both kinds, don’t it? Them that love big ideas can change the path of nations, sure, but they can lose sight of people. At worst, they stop caring. They’re willing to sacrifice them like Dutch done.” 

“I suppose. Maybe the best we can do is to do what we can for them around us. See what we can do for Tesoro Azul, and for Karen.” 

“You said it. She’s family. We’ll do what we can for her, like we couldn’t then. I figure if two messed up idiots like us can get to where we are now, there’s hope for just about anyone, right?”

He laughed, kissing her forehead. “Just about.”

She had the thought there was one more thing he needed to hear. “Perez. I know he…you could see yourself and Dutch with him and Montoya. No easy to thing to have to do what you done.”

“Maybe. But that’s why I needed to do it, not you.” He looked up towards the stars, letting out his breath slowly. “It could have gone differently. If my daddy lived. If it was the likes of Colm that took me in, not Dutch and Hosea. But blind loyalty to family don’t explain everything. A man makes his choices, even so. I made plenty of bad decisions, against my better judgment, but others, I didn’t. I ain’t proud of who I was, though there’s a man I could have chosen to be, and he’d have deserved a bullet between the eyes every bit as much as Perez. I been...struggling sometimes with the notion of bringing in bounties, me being as I was. You know that. But I see it now. I wasn’t no angel, but the ones we go after, the reason I never trusted Micah, why I finally left Dutch in the end, they crossed them lines for no reason except their own pleasure.” 

He could have made himself into the man he’d pretended to be, a cold-blooded killer without care or remorse. He could have been worse, reveling in torture and forcing women, like the Murfrees and O’Driscolls. But he hadn’t, and that mattered. She squeezed his hand in hers, knowing it would likely take him more time to fully accept that, but he’d worked his way through it at least. “You’re a good man, Arthur Griffith. You made yourself into one.”

“Thank you.” He said it softly, little more than a whisper, but she heard it all the same.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
Went to Tesoro Azul to talk about a business proposition. Ended up shooting the bastard there running the place like his own slave camp, and his dreadful brother. The man was too much like me. Twisted notions of family loyalty to a man who wasn’t worth the honor. Smart enough to know he was doing wrong and doing it all the same so as not to disappoint. I could see it in his eyes.

But then he’d gone and done things even I wouldn’t. Forced women, probably more too but that alone is enough. Men like that don’t stop. I ain’t sure they can. So I killed him. I can’t regret that but some part of me wishes it felt less like putting down a rabid animal.

We found Karen there too, drunk and lost. Brought her with us to Chuparosa. I wish I had helped her back at the Hollow but there was so much that needed doing and not much left in me to do all of it. She needed so much more to be OK than the others so it seems Sadie and me both had to cut her loose for the greater good and focus on them as we could save right then. That feels uncomfortably like me talking like Dutch. Gonna be raving about FAITH next.

None of the others helped her neither. Maybe we wasn’t much of a family in the end that we all split up and looked after our chosen few, and some like Karen so readily fell by the wayside. I chose Jack and his future above all else. I ain’t sure I could do otherwise even now. I did it for Isaac’s sake, and for the kid I was once who never had a chance or a choice. But it cost Karen in the end. I shall do better by her now.

**Sadie’s Journal**  
All this time wondering what become of any of the gang and aside from Charles, knowing nothing, and finally I have an answer for one of them. Karen was in Tesoro Azul. Miserable place, well rid of the beastly pair of brothers running it. Arthur and me have to do some fancy work to cover up messing in the whole business so it won’t come back wrongly on the innocent folk there but all the same, two bad men sent to hell is not a thing I regret. 

Some part of me wonders if Karen was in Mexico all this time and Arthur and me didn’t know. But as we was at Las Hermanas up until Christmas, easy to have missed her if so. I expect we will hear more of her story in time.

She was even more drunk than when last I saw her and I fear the months since have not been kind. I let her down. So much that needed doing but if I had room in me for pursuing vengeance against the O’Driscolls seems now to me I could have done more for her. Mostly it feels as though I SHOULD have. I got my fill of vengeance and found it a rotten meal in the end. I can’t change what I didn’t do then. We ain’t the people we want to be sometimes when it matters and all that is left is to do better if a second chance comes along. 

I hope we can save her. I ain’t sure what it will do to Arthur if we can’t. I ain’t sure what it will do to me. I know what grief can do to a person. But if Arthur and me can come back from being such broken, brutal, and fearsome things as we was, I have to think a good soul like Karen will be OK.


	32. Chuparosa II: Paradise Found

She woke with the first light of dawn peeking in the window, groggy and queasy again. She lay there a moment, trying to cut through the fog of her sleep-addled brain, trying to decide if she needed to hurry for a bucket. Nothing less pleasant than puking in an outhouse in the heat of summer, with the smell of it ready to set her off again right there.

But it passed, her roiling stomach settling back down. She rubbed her eyes, wanting to sleep more, but knowing it wouldn’t do much good. The fatigue was there to stay, and chances were she’d be more than ready for some sleep by the time the afternoon siesta came around. Genius move, so far as she was concerned, to build a rest period into the middle of the day, because she sorely needed a nap.

She turned onto her side, looking at Arthur, still peacefully asleep. Mumbled something too low to catch, one hand twitching for a moment beside the pillow, but she saw him smiling in his sleep all the same.

She should tell him. July 3rd--his birthday today, so a perfect day for it. Nothing absolutely positive yet, but she had plenty of reason to believe. All of it was things that could have been explained by other reasons, but for this long, and all of them together? She’d missed her bleeding time twice now. Hadn’t felt this tired before that she could remember, for this long. The nausea, the occasional vomiting--she remembered other women talking about that. Her mood kept sawing back and forth. And her breasts had grown some, and in the last couple of weeks, they hurt like hell. She’d have to move the buttons on her breastbands out very soon, because the pressure of suddenly too-tight cotton against her achingly sensitive chest made her want to scream. 

She’d seen him watching her with that careful look he had, obviously seeing some of it, and he had to be wondering. He wasn’t stupid. These last two weeks, it had become a strange burden, worrying and hoping alone.

She should tell him. But she hadn’t. She had to think it wasn’t just the notion that maybe she was wrong, or maybe if she put words to that wish too soon, it’d come to nothing, and she’d end up bleeding in a few days anyway. 

Looking at him, she saw he’d opened his eyes, studying her. “Morning.”

“Morning,” she answered, brushing her lips across his. “It’s your birthday, by the way.”

He let out a low, dismissive laugh. “Hardly seems worth the fuss just to point out that I’m getting old.” 

She leaned back just enough to catch his gaze with hers. “You ain’t old,” she said, reaching out, running her fingers through his sleep-rumpled hair. “But you’re still here. You’ll be able to _get_ old. That’s worth the fuss.”

Something shone in his eyes at that, and he nodded slightly, accepting it. She kissed him again, and again, leaning over him, nudging his shoulder with her hand to urge him to lay back. Sitting back long enough to grab the hem of her chemise and pull it over her head, dropping it beside the bed, seeing his eyes on her, the heat and desire building there, reveling in that. 

She reached down, undoing the buttons on his drawers, getting his help in shoving them down his hips and off. When she went back to kiss him again, he reached up, hands on her shoulders for a moment, gently moving downwards towards her breasts. Much as she loved his touch there normally, she thought the spike of pain it would likely cause now would mean she might well want to commit murder, and with gunbelts and knives hung off the bedpost--always within easy reach, old habits died hard--that seemed a poor idea. She caught his hands in hers, giving him a fierce smile, the arch of an eyebrow. “No, no, none of that today, mister.”

He looked up at her, obviously exasperated. “What you mean by that?”

She guided his hands down beside his head, pressing them against the mattress. “It’s your birthday. That means you just enjoy it. Don’t you worry none about me.” 

They both knew he was strong enough he could have broken her hold on him easily, but he didn’t, letting her hold him there with the merest effort. He gave her a knowing smile of his own. “Perhaps I _like_ worrying about you.”

She shook her head, rolling her eyes a bit. Of course he did. He’d always had a hard time with relaxing, letting her give him pleasure without counting it as some kind of ledger to be balanced in return. Like he struggled some still to believe he deserved that. She couldn’t complain too much, having someone who cared that much and wanted to see her well satisfied, but sometimes she wouldn’t mind him accepting what she’d give without worrying so damn much about it. “Always such a gentleman.”

“Just trying to do right by a fine and generous lady,” he quipped right back at her.

She gave another slight shove to his hands to make her point, and then let go, sitting back. “It’s _Sadie_ , not lady.” He laughed at that, but it was a gentle chuckle. 

“Daisy,” he said instead, eyes on hers, and that caught her right in the heart, as did that ready smile of his. 

He’d changed so much in three months since she’d kissed him, since he asked her to marry him. Especially since their wedding two months ago, she’d watched, seeing the light brighten within him even more. The man he’d grown into in such a hurry, filled with burgeoning happiness and confidence, standing straighter, smiling more, was a marvel. Like he’d said, now that he knew he could love and be loved and be worthy of that, there was nothing left to fear, and it had made a difference. It was like she’d watched him finally become who he wanted to be, who he was meant to be all along, shedding all the lies and the pretense and the awkwardness.

She was happier than she’d been in so long. But at the same time, she couldn’t help but have a kernel of fear sprouting in her heart, watching him change like this.

She’d known Jake so well, and the development of things between them had all been gentle and gradual too. Growing up beside him, eight years of being engaged, and then the two and a half years of being married and carefully talking about kids, waiting for it. They’d had time to adjust to all those changes so slowly they caused her no notice except in looking back, years later. Everything with Arthur had changed in such a rush, and him with it. He was a man growing right before her eyes, something quicksilver about him, parts of him evolving still. 

True, she knew what he stood for, what he loved, the sweetness and care that lay at the heart of him and shone all the clearer these days. But sometimes she looked at him, and wondered. Had he loved her only because she could look at him with tenderness, and believing so little of himself as he had, had he figured no other woman would have him? She didn’t know whether she’d been enough, only because he was enough for her. Now that he maybe started to know and believe that he was one hell of a man that women would want, was she really the wife he’d wanted? Or perhaps he really wanted someone sweet and soft and gentle to live that quiet and peaceful life, now that he’d become more of who he’d longed to be. Someone who reminded him less of all the bloodstains. Had he really had a choice, or had he figured she was his only option? _Am I really what you need?_

It felt a bit like she’d traded that earlier worry that she’d push him into something he didn’t want by her saying she wanted him, for the worry that he’d accepted her not believing there could be other options. Either way, it circled back to the same root, didn’t it? The fretful fear that he hadn’t chosen this, chosen her, that once again, things had just _happened_ to him and he’d accepted it as the only way, like he had for so many years. 

“I done something?” he asked cautiously, touching her softly on the hip. “You’re...away right now. I can tell.” 

Though some bits of him were too familiar yet, and his tendency to take the blame on himself immediately was one of them. She looked at him, giving him a smile, trying to collect her thoughts. “Just thinking I’m lucky you’re mine,” she teased him. “Happy’s a real good look on you, Arthur. You smiling these days like you are, you ain’t seen all the gals giving you a smile and a wink?” It felt like a weak way to allude to it, and she cursed herself for the dishonesty, but she couldn’t find the nerve right then to ask blunt as anything, _If you had the choice now, is it still me you’d want? How about in two years, when you go and change even more? You’re loyal. You’d stay. But I ain’t wanting obligation._

“Well, what of it? I made my choice.” He pushed up a bit, studying her, brows furrowed. “You thinking I’m regretting that?”

“You sure you don’t want someone…”

He cut her off, gently but clearly, fingers pressed for a moment to her lips. “No. You was there. Seen how bad I was. But you could see all that and say I was better than I thought, that I was dear to you. Enough to do all you done for me. Say you love me now, even so. You and me stood together through all of it. Other folk? They don’t know me. Just what they see now, what they think I am. But that ain’t but half of me. They couldn’t ever see all of it, and love me all the same. So I really don’t give a shit if I got a whole would-be harem out there giggling at me, I don’t want a one of them.” His eyes met hers, direct and almost fierce. “It’s you. It’s always gonna be you. Cause how could anyone else compare?” He reached for her hand, taking it in his.

It felt like exactly what she’d needed to hear. Though maybe he’d known that. He understood feeling insecure and worrying about being enough too well himself. He’d chosen her, chosen this, and known that he had that choice. That took a massive weight off her. Settling back down beside him, mustering her courage, she said, “I’m pretty sure I’m pregnant.”

The look on his face, astonishment and happiness and nervousness all at once, made for one remarkable sight. His eyes went to her belly for a moment, then back up to her face, and nodded. “I’d been wondering if...well, maybe. But I figured you’d say something if you had reason.”

“I ain’t completely certain. Gotta give it another month for that, I expect. But...I’m pretty sure. It’s been two months, and I ain’t bled at all. My monthlies, I mean. I’m tired, a lot. Stomach’s pissed off. And now my chest’s getting bigger and it hurts like hell.“

“I, ah, thought they’d grown a bit, but...”

“That why you was so eager to get your hands on them?” she asked him dryly.

“That why you didn’t want me touching them?” he returned with a faint smile. “Better you just said so than all that playing around with grabbing my hands.” 

She chuckled at that. “Boy, you’re one fine husband, but you still got some things to learn. That was playing all right, but that weren’t the only reason.” She cocked an eyebrow at him, nodding towards the head of the bed. “Put your hands up and keep them there. Don’t make me tell you again.” 

He hesitated for a moment, but then folded his hands behind his head obediently. “Well, I even said that phrase before, but sure weren’t in this context.”

“Shut up,” she said, shaking her head and laughing, leaning down and kissing him again, then kissing his nose, cheeks, chin, throat, collarbones, kissing her way down his body. Glanced up at him, giving him a grin, reaching out and running her fingers lightly over his cock, hearing the sudden catch in his breath at it. “Just lay back and enjoy it, all right?” 

She had to admit she always enjoyed it too, this big strong man rendered so helpless by her fingers and tongue and mouth. The way his breath caught in his throat, the low moans and sounds he made, the way his eyes slid shut, the occasional restless small push of his hips against her hand. He’d told her shyly before she did this the first time that he’d never had anyone do it for him before. She wasn't surprised by that, given he'd told her openly enough about his few experiences, so she got a secret pleasure out of knowing she'd been the one to give him that kind of enjoyment. Once she'd left him wrung out by it, he didn’t quite listen in the end to the notion of her not needing anything in return, but him looking at her with that heat in his eyes, insisting he’d loved it but he really _wanted_ this for his birthday too, thank you very much, she could only laugh, give in, and let him prove he’d taken the point himself by ordering her to stay put too, her fingers gripping the pillow for dear life as he turned himself to the task. 

He’d learned this particular way of pleasing a woman with astonishing speed too. True, he hadn’t been an ignorant schoolboy. He’d already known about it, heard plenty from people talking, just never had the chance to have done it with Mary or anyone else. Brought that same enthusiasm and joy to it as he did the whole business of making love. There might be something to be said for a man not jaded by too much meaningless experience, and being the one to teach him some things brought its own kind of pleasure. She certainly couldn't complain, wanting so much to reach down and run her fingers through his hair, but sticking to her resolve to show that she could keep her hands up too, just like him.

It hadn’t caught her off guard that much to know he could let her have the upper hand and not be bothered, because he’d been willing to do so all the way back at Beaver Hollow when it came to the fight. It surprised her a bit to know she was all right with him having control of things too, that the trust she had conquered that instinctive fear. Lots of things she couldn’t have known before they mustered their courage back at Lake Don Julio. So maybe she’d changed some too, since that day.

Once she caught her breath again, she reached for him, teasing him in a low voice, "One more present, huh?" as she settled over him, body still quivering with the last aftershocks of pleasure as she took him inside her. There was the giddy rush of having learned the way of each other now, finding that mutual rhythm easily, his hands on her hips, watching his eyes, the slide of his skin against hers, riding him for all she was worth. There was the relief that there could still be such joy and wonder and heat and laughter to this. She’d never forget what happened to her up in Ambarino from the O’Driscolls, just the same as he couldn’t ever forget what happened to him at Colm’s hands. It was there, and flickers of it rose now and again. But it hadn’t ruined this for her. Being able to have something this fine with Arthur felt like a defiant victory all the same.

The quiet afterwards, simply being together, was always good too. She’d have to move in a few moments, get off of him, from the sheer heat of two bodies together in the desert morning heat. But somehow, the two of them always waited as long as they could before that, cherishing that space of staying cuddled up close and tight for a little while. She felt his hand on her hip still, the slow stroke of his thumb there. She raised her head. “Art?” He looked back at her, eyes gentle and content. “If it ain’t so, and I’m mistaken…” She almost regretted saying it now, not wanting to risk that fragile hope too early. But no, it had been right to say it. It was theirs, not hers alone, for good or bad.

“We’ll be all right,” he promised her. “Whatever happens.” 

She kissed him one last time. “Happy Birthday.”

Karen was in the kitchen already, coffee on from the smell of things. She glanced over her shoulder at them coming downstairs. “Do I want to know if you was sleeping in, or otherwise occupied?” Sadie felt herself blushing, saw Karen’s eyes on her face, glancing past her towards Arthur. Whatever she saw there, her eyebrows rose. “Well, guess that answers it,” she said, turning back to the stove with a shrug. “At least you two keep it down.” 

“Thank you,” she answered in an awkward mumble. Some things couldn’t be avoided in close quarters, true, but much like overhearing her parents when she was a kid, it didn’t do to dwell on it too much.

“Hey, it’s said in earnest. Arthur knows. He was stuck living next to John and Abigail, most of the time,” Karen said dryly.

“Don’t remind me,” Arthur replied with a groan and a roll of his eyes. “Jesus, those two and their caterwauling.”

Karen turned, leaning back against the counter, flashing him a grin. “Remember when we was in Nevada, and one night they started the full performance and we just decided enough was enough?”

“You and me yelling commentary and imitating the both of them, until John comes out holding his pants up and yowling like a pissed off tomcat,” Arthur said, laughing. “My Lord.” 

“They did keep it down a bit after that.”

Arthur went for the coffee pot, bringing it to the table, Karen and Sadie taking their seats there too. “Sure, you could only hear it _halfway_ across camp.” He sighed, suddenly awkward, rubbing the back of his neck with one hand. “How drunk was we that night, anyway?” 

Karen’s smile vanished. “Pretty Goddamn tipsy.”

He nodded, a slow, almost tired acknowledgment. “Could say that about too many nights, I expect.”

Sadie poured them some coffee silently, shoving the battered tin cups towards them. Karen grabbed hers, taking a sip, eyeing the two of them over the rim of the cup. “Well, guess that kills the conversation dead.”

It had taken her the better part of a week to get back to things, but she’d gotten through those rough days. Faster than Swanson, as Sadie had hoped. Arthur and her had privately agreed to do what they could to keep Karen busy, occupied with things while she got through the worst of the stuff in her mind, particularly given the saloon was only a two minute walk down the street.

Not that hard, in some ways. It was good to have her there, though Karen and Arthur had something like four years of stuff to talk about, and sometimes she sat there, listening to it and enjoying it, but recognizing she was no part of those shared memories. Though she and Karen had a few of their own, rarely pleasant though, given the whole tone of that year.

“You’re out at the stables with Jose today, right?” she asked Arthur.

Arthur finished his coffee, heading to the stove, putting the skillet on for making breakfast. “Yeah, he’s got some horses in. Need some cleaning and inspection, checking their temperaments.”

“Think me and Karen are gonna go hunting. Rio Del Toro, maybe. Go for some ducks or the like. Get some dinner.” The thought of hunting down a mule deer or the like, and skinning a large animal, made her stomach churn. They could bring back birds, and she knew Karen or Arthur would be fine cleaning them. She hoped like hell the queasiness would pass in time. 

He looked at her, obviously seeing she had that handled for the morning. “Good, good.” One breakfast was done, he collected his hat, heading out the door. It took her and Karen a little while longer to prepare their things, but soon enough they were on their way north. She gave a wave to Arthur at the stables, seeing him busy with the horses already, and headed in to get Bob. She hadn’t asked about Karen’s Old Belle, not sure whether the mare had died or been sold by the time she got to Tesoro Azul, but she trusted some things would come up in their own time. As was, Arthur was working this whole week for Jose as the price of the surefooted black and white paint mare that Karen now rode. Nameless still, so far as Sadie knew. Karen didn’t need to know about that trade either.

Getting to the riverbank, she found a good patch of scrub to sit in for concealment, eyeing a small mud flat where the ducks were already feeding. She handed Karen the shotgun. 

“You really want me handling this?” Karen said dryly. 

She shrugged. “Ain’t sure why you shouldn’t. You was good enough with a gun to ride bank robberies and guard camp.”

“Sure, I took a few shots at folk, but I ain’t never been hunting,” she admitted.

Sadie knew that full well. She’d been the only woman at camp who went out hunting, and that only because she’d refused to be told otherwise after she’d come back from that trip to Rhodes with Arthur and known, with a thrill of victory in her, that she’d won. One of the senior guns of the gang and he’d accepted her insisting on her place in things. “Well, no haughty menfolk here to tell you not to worry your pretty head and go darn some socks instead. No time like the present to learn. Lot of it’s like riding out on jobs, I expect. All patience, observation, and timing.”

“Animals don’t shoot back none, though,” Karen said with a joking smile. 

She guided Karen through some of the basics, waiting until some ducks landed, grabbing the repeater herself. They bagged three birds, and Karen’s little crow of triumph at landing a good shot on one made Sadie smile in spite of herself. She tied the birds to Bob’s saddle. “Good haul for the day, I’d say. Ain’t like we got two dozen folk to feed. Just us three.”

“Gonna head back?” Karen asked.

She shook her head. “We been here only a little while. Head back before mid-day, sure, but might as well find some shade and enjoy a nice day.” Stretched out in the shade of a cottonwood, she kicked off her boots and socks, undoing a few more buttons of her shirt, enjoying the faint breeze.

Karen lay down beside her, on her stomach. “Gotta say you was right about the pants.” She gestured down towards her legs. “Better for riding and all.”

“Told you so,” she said with some satisfaction. Though it struck her that chances were decent she’d be back in skirts soon enough, and for the rest of the year. Pants wouldn’t work with a growing belly. She suppressed a sigh at that.

Karen was in a mood to talk, so best pursue that. She’d kept to herself a lot, so Sadie figured it was best to strike while the iron was hot. Turning over on her side, she said, “We never did get to talk much. Wasn’t exactly the best of times we met in to begin. And I was so bad off myself after Jake died, and then...well, then Sean got killed…”

“You trying to make conversation here?”

“It’s either that or we stare at each other over the dinner table all awkward, and Arthur gets upset and thinks he’s gotta hurry to fix something,” she said dryly. 

“You two seem real happy.”

“It didn’t come easy.” It seemed important Karen know that. “You known him longer than me. Probably had a better sense of all the things he got stuck carrying around inside him. After all, he said you was born to the life, like he was. You said something about that too, back when we was at Shady Belle. That you ain’t never known no different than that.”

Karen bit her lip, nodding, turning over onto her back with a heavy sigh, lying there with her arms crossed over her chest. “Gangs running all over the South after ‘65. Confederate bushwhackers who was determined to keep fighting the war. Pissed off at Yankees coming in, pissed off at slaves being free and even getting the vote.” Her derisive tone said enough about what she thought of that. “My daddy was one of them, out Mississippi way. My momma, she worked in a saloon, and he talked into running away with him, being his gal. I got her name--Jones. Daddy run off when I was nine. Heard he got married to some haughty bitch in Georgia with a silver spoon up her ass. He come from money himself, so she said. But Momma stayed. Cause the Jasper Gang, we was family. It was a good life, that. Until I started getting older and my Uncle Frank started looking at me a certain way. Momma wouldn’t have none of it, so we left, headed west, out into Arizona. She went back to the saloon life. Pouring drinks. Dealing cards, turning tricks where she needed, running scams on drunk buffoons. She run off with a fella when I was fifteen. Said I was old enough to be on my own. So I started doing what she done. I was good with the cards and scams already. And that was that, until Hosea tried to scam folk at the poker table I was dealing.”

“And they took you in.” It seemed a sad, lonely life in the end. Daughter to a father who’d never wanted to claim her, who’d abandoned her for the chance at an advantageous marriage, leered at by the men who claimed to be her family the moment she started blossoming into womanhood, abandoned by her mother then too, and stuck working in a saloon and making ends meet however she could, crooked or otherwise. Still retaining fond memories of the only family she’d had, though, and whatever kindnesses and love there had been.

“Hosea said he could always use folk clever enough to spot a scam.”

“Not a bad life for a few years, then. But...you and Arthur both, you never knew nothing different. I saw how hard it was for you both to get caught up in the gang turning mean and crazy. Seeing what it really was underneath Dutch’s ‘kind father to us all’ act. Neither of you was meant for that life.”

Karen let out a harsh laugh. “What, this where you tell me I’m meant for more than shooting and screwing and slugging back whiskey? What, exactly?”

“Arthur’s managed to find something else.”

“He had you,” Karen said, a fierce heat of intensity in her voice, a harsh edge of sorrow and anger both. “Who do I got? Sean’s dead. And nobody in that camp cared. Too busy worrying about how they’d get themselves out.”

“I let you down. There was a lot on me when we was in Lakay, but I let you down. I know it, all right?’ She looked over at Karen. “And I know a thing or two about losing a man you love. You saw how broken to pieces I was.” She had to agree with Arthur that Sean and Karen hadn’t been a thing that could ever truly last, that they would have been no good for each other, but that didn’t mean the love hadn’t been there, even so. She couldn’t help but reach out, putting a hand on Karen’s arm. “Won’t say it don’t hurt. But...you saw how I was in Beaver Hollow. If I could come back from that, awful as I was, you got far less to regret than me. And you got me. You got Arthur. We ain’t letting you down again, OK?”

Karen bit her lip, her hands clenching into fists. “Sure. You’re newly married, and gotta be thrilled to have a drunk embarrassment from the past foisted on you. What you telling folk in town, anyway?”

“That you’re Arthur’s sister, Mrs. Jones, come to stay with us, and you was taken sick for a little while.”

“ _Mrs._ Jones, is it?”

“You’re a widow,” Sadie told her dryly. “Recent. Which is why you was coming to stay with us. Figured you’d sooner keep your own name than be forced to claim you’re a Griffith.”

“No wedding ring,” Karen pointed out, holding up her left hand.

“Easy enough to get you one. Or you could just tell them Mr. Jones couldn’t afford one.”

Karen gave a derisive sound of amusement. “You can get a ring real cheap. A lousy one, but it’s the notion that matters. Women with big bellies say their man was too poor for a ring, and everyone knows that husband never existed. See, you’re running a scam, you _commit_ to it. So you might as well get me the damn ring before folk start noticing.” 

For a moment she almost regretted having buried her ring up in Ambarino, but no, much as she cared for Karen and wanted to help, she wouldn’t have wanted Jake’s ring to become part of another sham marriage. It was best that she’d given it back to him. “Could be worse,” Sadie said, trying to cheer her up. “Arthur and me had to live in a convent for a year pretending we was married, cause the TB ward was there.”

Hearing Karen’s whoop of laughter at that, she found herself smiling, enjoying Karen’s wholehearted humor for the first time since they’d found her at Tesoro Azul. “Guess that turned out fine for you two in the end,” Karen said when she settled down again, wiping her eyes.

“Took a long time, but yeah. Only figured it all out a few months ago. What happened to you after you left? If you can say.”

“Nothing much to tell. I left. Seemed nothing to stay in Beaver Hollow for. I could go be miserable on my own. Made my way down from Annesburg slowly. Cards, mostly. Robbing some folk. Other stuff. Whatever kept me in booze enough to keep going. Stubborn enough to not just drink myself to death, for some stupid reason. Just kept going west and south gradually, till I ended up over the border maybe--two months ago? I don’t know. Didn’t matter. Didn’t need too many words for either a bottle or a deck of cards. Figured I’d just keep going. Then Old Belle died out in the desert. Fella who picked me up in his wagon, that Perez--I knew what he was after. America, Mexico, ain’t no difference. Men don’t bring a woman alone to a saloon promising her a job for but one reason. I just…” Karen’s voice went low and husky and tight with pain. “Just didn’t care anymore. They kept giving me all the liquor I wanted, lots more than I’d been able to scrape by on. Enough that it didn’t hurt no more. That was all that mattered.” 

“It still hurts, me losing Jake, all the things I done too. But I’m happy, even so. I was happy, even before Arthur and me figured out we wanted each other. It’ll be all right for you too, in time,” Sadie promised her.

“I ain’t sure on that.” Karen rolled over, curled in on herself, head resting in one hand. “I don’t remember a lot. I’d get drunk fast as they’d let me off the card table. Once they told me...what I was gonna be doing to pay my bill. Guess it’s better I don’t recall.”

“It’s better, trust me,” Sadie said grimly. Though maybe it wasn’t quite the same, being used by however many men who’d paid for her as opposed to the O’Driscolls and their love of terror and violence, but it was close enough. 

“But...you still know when you’ve been with men after you wake up.” Her eyes lowered, a flinching expression of shame and disgust crossing her face. “So it happened. Don’t hurt when I piss or nothing, so maybe I got lucky there. I can hope. But it’s been only a few weeks. Some of that takes a while to show.”

Sadie nodded at that. “I only started to breathe easier when we was at Clemens Point, I’ll be honest with you. That was over two months since Arthur and Dutch rescued me.” She didn’t have to pretend with Karen. The younger woman had to know what happened with the O’Driscolls. She resisted the instinctive urge to drop a hand to her own belly. “You could be pregnant too, you know.” It seemed like a strange notion that she was likely carrying a baby she and Arthur had desperately wanted, and Karen might have one she hadn’t. Karen let out a harsh sigh, almost half a sob. “Grimshaw showed me how to deal with it, the right herbs and all. Or maybe you already know. If that’s what you want.”

“I don’t know,” Karen mumbled, burying her face in her hand, obviously overwhelmed with all of it. “I just…” 

“You caught something, we’ll get Felipe to help you, whatever he can do. The other, if that’s so? That’s your decision what you want to do. Ain’t nobody else’s.” She sat up, put a hand on Karen’s shoulder. “Whatever happens, I ain’t leaving you. You hear? We’ll see you right. You got a place with us for as long as you want it. He says you’re his sister. He means it. You’re my sister too.”

Karen’s eyes shone again, but she gave a slight smile, and nodded. “Thanks.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Summer wore on, and the desert might not change so much as the trees would further north, but things changed all the same. Their letter to Don Miguel--Sadie’s skill at spinning politely worded fawning bullshit, really, and only rendered in his hand--got answered politely, and it seemed they were off the hook, the hidalgo suspecting nothing amiss. Avila had been appointed the new _jefe_ out at Tesoro Azul, off his and Sadie’s recommendation, and Arthur prayed he used that power rightly. Sadie told him it was a certain thing in August, and Felipe confirmed it, said the baby was likely due in January.

Apparently kids were a thing catching. Something in the water that spring? Who knew, but Chuparosa was going to be one bustling place early in 1902, that was for damn sure. Juanita and Pedro were among those having a kid too, and he’d given them his sincerest congratulations. And given he’d just watched Sadie going through all of it, he wondered exactly when either she or Karen were going to tell him. Any man who could watch his sister running to throw up at the smell of breakfast bacon and not make some connections was an idiot, a fool, or both. It was mid-September now, so she had to be at least three months in.

It felt odd to see the two of them close ranks for each other, shutting him out from that, but he supposed it was only sensible. He was a man, after all. Though some part of him stung to wonder if Sadie had kept him away from it because he’d been the problem at one time, been that man who fathered a child to a mother left unmarried, so maybe she thought he had nothing to offer Karen here. But she’d known. He would have done right by Eliza, would have married her. He couldn’t blame her for not taking that offer on the terms he made, but he had at least offered, and been sincere in it. He’d messed up the rest, he could admit. 

Watching the two of them laughing together earlier that day, playing with Dusty, throwing a ball for him to fetch, he had to smile at seeing Sadie, radiant as she was, and Karen’s happiness. Different than he’d seen her before, dressed in pants and a shirt with rolled up sleeves, hair twisted back into a knot without her usual curls framing her face, but the smile was what mattered. It was good to have her there, and not just to jaw about days gone by. Seeing Karen slowly start to get her strength and spark back, the fade of the craving from her eyes thinking about a bottle, felt good.

He just wondered wryly if they intended on making him a part of all that before he and Sadie had their kid, let alone Karen delivering hers. Felt strange to be jealous of that sisterhood growing between them in leaps and bounds now that there wasn’t the massive weight of fear and survival crushing everything, but then, he’d been nothing too remarkable as a brother to John too, up until maybe he’d helped John in that graveyard so they could rescue Jack. That had been the first where he saw John finally starting to step into the shoes of the father he could be, should be, and maybe that had been when some part of him swore he’d do what he could to help see them safe.

He’d been an absent failure of a father, a poor excuse of an almost-fiance, a petty jealous bastard of an older brother, and a stupidly, blindly dutiful son. Not a record to find any pride in. Apparently he’d made a decent husband, so Sadie kept insisting, so he’d learned better, become better, but he had to try now to be better to Karen. She needed the help, and she’d need it even more.

Sitting out on the rooftop, practicing the guitar, he picked idly at the strings, shuffling through some of Sadie’s collection of sheet music. He still got in most everything he could from Esteban, knowing how dear it was to her. Started teaching her the guitar too, another private thing of theirs. Karen hadn’t been interested, not yet, anyway. Or maybe she held off to give them some space, something private of their own. It was hard to know sometimes, feeling this new dynamic out.

As if he’d summoned her with the thought, she stepped out onto the roof, sat down while he finished working his way through “Shenandoah”, and then moved onto “The Trail To Mexico”, one of the old cattle ranching songs he knew she knew from days in camp, giving her a nod and a raised eyebrow in invitation.

He saw the quick grin she flashed him, and she joined in with gusto, the old lively Karen with the lovely voice he remembered so well. 

A bit of a cheekily rueful song about a woman marrying another while her intended was away for a long time, but Karen clearly enjoyed it too, especially at the end, and he couldn’t help but join in himself along the way where he remembered the words. “Well damn your gold, and damn the bullets too, God pity a _leader_ who don’t prove true,” though she gave him a sarcastic smirk, having changed “woman” to “leader”, and he bit back a laugh at her sharp-tongued criticism of Dutch, “I’m heading West where the bullets fly, and stay on the trail till the day I die.”

Finishing, he glanced over at her. She gave a slight shrug and a smile, gesturing towards the guitar. “Looks like you been learning things in the last two years.”

“Had a lot of time to learn that first year. Couldn’t do too much. We lungers was all teaching each other stuff, just to pass the time. Taught some folk to read, taught some English when my Spanish got good enough. That kind of thing.” 

She dipped her head slightly in acknowledgment of that. “Guess there weren’t much time for all that before, busy as you always was.”

“Good to hear you singing. You always did have a fine voice.” 

“Whereas you could carry a tune in a bucket, but the minute you was drinking, there went your rhythm,” she teased him, but gently.

He laid the guitar aside, sitting there, elbows resting on his knees. “Yeah. That’s so. You and me both. We made for a pair of bad drunks.” They’d sheepishly or jokingly acknowledged it back in those days, but no point in pretense now. “Pretending it was all cause we just liked to raise some hell. Weren’t it at all, though.”

“Oh really?” 

He looked up, over at her, raising an eyebrow. “Don’t gotta pretend. I seen you, clear as you seen me. Just neither of us wanting to admit we was such good buddies with the liquor cause we couldn’t stand the folk we’d become. Easier to drink and forget than do anything about it.”

She didn’t protest that harsh condemnation, just settled down beside him. “Didn’t seem there was much other choice,” she said, voice small and sad. “Wasn’t fit for no other life. Screwing over rich bastards was one thing. Outsmarting them, running a good scam? Felt good, didn’t it?”

“It did,” he acknowledged, giving her a nod. “That felt clean enough, I reckon. But that wasn’t all we was doing. It was all the rest that done it. The bullets and the beatings and the threats and the killings. Things that made you and me find a bottle so you wasn’t having to try to live with yourself.”

“Saying we’d get back to the good times. But the good times, they never really was.” 

“No. There were good moments. Good days. Tried to make that enough since there was nothing else.”

Karen glanced around them, indicating the house. “Looks like you found something else.”

“Trying, anyhow. It come down to making a choice: change or die.” It made things sound a bit bleak, he realized, so he tried to alleviate it some. “Started thinking about having a future that was _mine_ rather than letting life happen around me. We got like that as kids, you and me, cause we had no choice then. Just trying to get by. But it’s different now. You made one choice already, I’d say.” His eyes went to her belly--nothing showing yet, but then he wouldn’t expect it, from what he’d seen with Sadie. But he looked, and Karen saw him looking.

She glanced away. “So you know about that.”

“Kind of hard to ignore with another pregnant woman in the house, Karen.” He’d heard Susan talking to Abigail one night, asking her if she genuinely wanted that baby she was carrying. So he’d known women had their ways of things there too, even if those secrets weren’t ones he knew full well. “You sure you want that baby?”

“It’s mine, and I do,” Karen said, eyes narrowing, voice full of determination. Something in her face, her voice, reminding him of Eliza, protective and fierce, sitting on those boarding house steps with him. “You don’t got no say in this, Arthur _Griffith_.”

“I know. Just--wanted you to know it’s your decision.”

“Sadie and me been through all that.” He nodded in acknowledgment of that. “I know the reality ain’t the most _genteel_ , unmarried woman getting knocked up when she’s senseless drunk, but you know what? I don’t much care. Folk will believe what they hear. I’m a poor unfortunate widow and my sweet Mr. Jones,” she flexed her left hand, wearing the wedding ring Sadie had gotten for her, “ain’t never gonna meet his baby. It’s sad, but we’ll get by.”

He should tell her, much as some part of him froze in terror at the thought still. “Sure. What happened was some mistake, but that don’t matter. You’ll love your kid even so. I know it.”

She looked at him carefully, obviously hearing something in his tone. “Arthur?”

He was committed now. But he might as well say it. He’d been there, or at least in some kind of similar situation. He could at least tell her that Eliza had gotten through it. “Summer just after I turned twenty-two, Mary had told me to get lost, and this waitress I met, she was feeling blue from a fella riding off on her, and...well. We was strangers, but a whole lot of whiskey made that not matter. Neither of us remembered that night. But she got pregnant from it. She wouldn’t marry me cause I wouldn’t leave the gang, and being young and dumb as I was, I didn’t. We had a son. And I...did what I could for them, when I could get away from the gang. Wasn’t nearly enough. So Eliza, she raised him almost by herself.” He could say it now more matter-of-fact, without the searing guilt that had been there before. “They was both killed by robbers when he was only four.” He breathed in, steadying himself. “His name was Isaac. And how he came to be, that was stupid and careless. Maybe even a bit sad, but that didn’t matter. He was the finest thing I ever made happen in this world.”

Karen looked at him, green eyes wide and startled. Opened her mouth for a moment to say something, then shut it, shook her head, and took another few moments. “You know, for a little while, I had an eye for you, when I first come on. Hosea warned me no point to it, that you wasn’t looking for a woman. Saw that he was right. Closest I think you come to it was Abigail after John left, and even that wasn’t much. You gave her plenty of admiring looks, sure. Never got the other part of it, that look in your eye like you was imagining her naked, and I seen that _plenty_ with Sadie these last months, thanks.” He felt himself blushing, giving her an awkward, apologetic smile. “Don’t worry,” she said dryly. “She looks at you the same way. So all them years you wasn’t one for women, you was giving yourself a due dose of punishment, that it?”

Somehow he wasn’t surprised that Karen could understand it so immediately. “Just about. Got past that, in the end. Took such a long time. Lot of patience from Sadie.” He reached out, putting an arm around Karen’s shoulders, feeling her lean into him. “You’ll get by. You’re strong. And I swear to you that I’ll do my best by your kid so long as you need me. If they ain’t got your poor unfortunate Mr. Jones to be their daddy, they’ll have an uncle at least.” That felt right, bright and true as gold. He’d done poorly by Isaac, and there was no mending that. But he could do right by the child he’d have with Sadie, and right by Karen’s child too, a kid left without a father, raised by a mother alone. He’d been too afraid to step in too much with Jack, even if Karen was right--he had never wanted Abigail as a lover, he’d only wanted so much to try to make amends to Eliza and Isaac by helping another brave and capable young woman left virtually abandoned by a young scared dumbass who’d gotten her pregnant. But he’d been too scared himself to offer that help so openly, and have to explain himself to Abigail, and face all the nightmare of it squarely for the first time in years.

“I appreciate that,” Karen said, a husky edge to her voice.

“I mean it. Anyone looks at you or your kid wrong--”

Now she laughed, slapping his shoulder lightly with one hand. “You changed a lot, but yeah, there’s that big tough old Arthur.”

He couldn’t help but smile at that. “You’ll be all right. You’re tough too.” 

“Just so long as you ain’t gonna offer to marry _me_ out of some guilt. We ain’t gonna be like them Mormons.”

“God, no. Sadie kept me on my toes already, and then you come along. Bad enough with a wife and sister. I’m outnumbered. Married to the both of you? You gals would eat me alive.” He loved Karen, true, but only as a sister.

She laughed at that. He tried to think how to say this next part, trying to not be the happily married man offering some condescending advice. “Besides, you need something of your own. I know you loved Sean. But--can’t help but see what it was like with me and Mary. Couldn’t stop myself loving her even when I knew it wasn’t right, that we didn’t much like each other. It was like some kind of sickness in me.”

“I know,” Karen said, voice barely above a whisper. “And seemed like I couldn’t help myself, sometimes. But he...he was mine. He wanted me. Nobody else did.”

“I know the way of that. You both should have had more than that,” he told her as gently as he could. “There’ll be someone else. Someone who sees you rightly, and loves you. I gotta believe it.”

“Might be less likely for a widow with a kid,” Karen said smartly, practical as anything, “but it’s a fine thought. I got you two, though. That means a lot.” She pushed up from the ledge, stifling a yawn with one hand. “And I’m tired all the damn time now, so I’m gonna turn in.” She paused at the door, turned back and looked over her shoulder. “Thanks, Arthur. You’re all right as a brother.”

He stayed out there a little while longer, looking up at the stars, feeling more content than he had in a long while. Things were changing still, but they would be all right. He could believe that now.

Heading in, he found Sadie stretched out on the bed already, dozing. Undressing down to his drawers, he lay down on his side, next to her. She opened her eyes, giving him a smile. “Hey there, you.”

“Hey.” He shoved the pillow back into better comfort, smoothing out some of the lumps. Dusty liked to sleep with Karen these days, but Dido jammed herself in between them as usual, and Sadie reached out to pet her. Arthur could hear the rumbling purr even from a couple feet away. “Sweetheart, was you ever gonna tell me about Karen’s baby, or just wait until I needed to fetch Felipe for the delivery?” He’d meant to be smartmouthed and funny about it, but he imagined there was an edge of confusion in it, even so.

Dido transferred her allegiance, brushing up against Arthur now, demanding attention. “You ain’t a fool,” Sadie answered. “I saw damn well that you knew. But with Isaac and all, well--figured you needed to deal with it your own way. Come to her about it when you was ready.” She looked up at him, reaching out, touching his face with a slow stroke of her fingers. “You and her was talking, just now? Heard you playing, and her singing, but after that...”

“I told her about Isaac. That I’d be there for her and the kid.” So they hadn’t shut him out, they’d only been waiting. Sadie hadn’t told Karen about Isaac either, leaving that to him. “She’ll be all right.” 

“Good.” Then her eyes suddenly went wide, bright with excitement. “I think that was...shit! That was the baby moving in there, just now.” She took his hand in hers, placing it on the slight swell of her belly pushing up against her chemise. “Well, guess you probably can’t feel nothing, it’s just a little tickle. But--yeah, she’s there. I can feel her.” No, he couldn’t feel anything, and he got over the momentary disappointment there, caught up in the wonder in Sadie’s voice. 

“She?” he asked, looking up from his hand to her face.

“What, of course you’re gonna insist it’s a _big strapping boy_?” she teased him.

“No. No, I wouldn’t mind a girl at all.” In some ways, he suspected he’d prefer a daughter, rather than confront more reminders of Isaac. He let himself start to imagine that little girl, all the possibilities of who she could turn out to be, feeling the excitement of that. “If she’s half so brave and smart as her momma, she’ll be one hell of a woman someday.” He leaned down a bit, looking down towards Sadie’s belly. “So here you are, huh? Seems you’re gonna have a cousin too.” He thought of Hosea’s words then. Never too early to start, was it? “I love you. And your momma and me both can’t wait to meet you.” He gave that little bump a gentle pat, resting his hand there a moment more, then let go. He turned to blow out the lantern, gathering Sadie into his arms, knowing he fell asleep with a smile on his face in the darkness.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Arthur and Sadie to Don Miguel Del Rey**  
Honorable Sir,  
You don’t know me, or my wife, but we had cause recently to take on some protection work for your boss at Tesoro Azul, Eduardo Montoya. It was a generous contract and seemed like a good business partnership could be the result.

Unfortunately the Nuevo Paraisan desert is a hostile place of late. No doubt you have heard of roaming bandits by the name of DEL LOBO making a nuisance of themselves. We have taken on our share of them miscreants but much like the Hydra of myth, seems like they sprout two more for every one killed. We was coming back from doing the job to meet with Señor Montoya to get our payment and discuss other possibilities. We unfortunately found him in the desert along with his assistant Señor Perez, victims of a savage outlaw attack. Familiar with their methods as they are, it was clear. They had been killed some days prior so we will spare you the gruesome details but there is no doubt in both our minds of their identities.

We rode to Tesoro Azul to report the unfortunate news. The bartender there, Manuel Avila, was invaluable in helping sort things out and letting us know what should be done. He seems a man with a good head on his shoulders. 

Please accept our sincerest condolences and rest assured that we shall continue to fight the Del Lobo menace where possible.

Yours sincerely,  
Arthur and Sadie Griffith

 **Arthur’s Journal**  
No more bounty hunting for a while, it would seem. I can’t much regret leaving behind blood and lead for a while, even if some part of me thinks I have yet to earn carving out that pocket of peace. I made a promise and so I’m gonna hold to it. I ain’t quite sure how ends will meet but I’ll do what needs doing for that. 

After all, I got much now to look forward to. Gonna be a father early next year, and it seems an uncle too courtesy of Karen, so I will certainly get my fill of having kids around.

Chances are I look a fool being so giddy over it and yet it’s the thing I wanted most for so long. Karen is doing better too, a lot brighter and happier, and it will be no easy thing for her with a child but she ain’t alone. She’s stronger than she believes. If someone like me can manage all this she’ll do all right. She’s a good woman. She only needed the chance to let herself be one until she can see that. I intend to do as much for her on that as I can, much as Sadie done for me. 

So here we are, family again. A trio of drunks, killers, thieves, and liars, but that don’t have to be the whole of us. We’ve changed already. We’ll be OK in the end.

**(Sketch of Sadie asleep in a chair, with a slight baby bump)**

**(Sketch of Karen, with Dido in her lap and Dusty at her side)**

**Sadie’s Journal**  
Things sure is changing in a hurry but I think I got my mind better wrapped around all of it now. Six months ago I was a pretend wife, trying to keep mending fences with a sister I let down. Now I got a true husband, a baby on the way, and fixed things with Caroline, and found me another sister in Karen.

It’s good to know her away from all the bullshit we was going through then. She’s a fine woman. I see a lot of Arthur in her. They could be brother and sister in truth in more than looks. They both got a good and kind heart bruised up by a life they wasn’t suited to live, the fear of not knowing any other way to live, and hiding it all behind a lot of big outlaw bluster and apparently a hell of a lot of liquor.

Arthur come out all right in the end. More than all right. He’s truly something to behold these days. So Karen will be fine too. She’s had her share of sorrow and bad times but if anyone can help I expect it’s him and me. We understand plenty. She’s decided to have that baby and she knows Arthur and me will do everything we can for her. Happiness ain’t there yet for her but it wasn’t handed over in a rush for us either. She seems far more at peace, and that’s a good start. Ain’t seen her look at a liquor bottle with that longing eye in a while. 

I expect Arthur and me will argue over names for the kid and all sorts of things soon enough. He’ll learn that he gets the bigger say in that when he’s the one who went through them months of pissing every hour, and being sore and exhausted and cranky as hell. I’m gonna be big as a circus elephant eventually too. 

Not at all the life I expected when I imagined myself pregnant, but I can’t regret what second chances I have found, and made, have amounted to here. It’s a good life, all in all.


	33. Minnewakan: True North

**Several years later…**

Strange times, to run a journey in reverse after so long. Four and a half years gone since he’d come from the Wapiti reservation down to Chuparosa, and now, here he was. They’d gone from Mexico up to the MacFarlane Ranch in February as usual, and with the lambing and all completed unusually early this year given it was only the end of April, they’d bid farewell to Drew and Bonnie, headed out east and north. 

Blackwater first, and they’d spent as little time there as possible, but passed through without anyone’s remark, and he’d breathed a sigh of relief. The rail line still wasn’t completed to connect over the Upper Montana, so they’d taken a stagecoach up to Strawberry, hired a wagon to Riggs Station. Hopped the next train, and here they were on their way to Valentine. From there, north to the Wapiti, though it would take a hell of a lot longer to get up into Canada and the province of New Caledonia, and the new Wapiti reservation, than it would have been to ride to the old American reservation in Ambarino. 

Looking out the window, seeing Big Valley go by before they crossed the Kamassa, he felt a hand on his knee, and glanced back down to see Bea had woken from her nap asleep beside him, and now she clearly wanted his attention, practically vibrating with energetic impatience. “Now, what’s all this? You ain’t tired no more?”

She gave him a grin that reminded him so much of Sadie’s. “Wanna _see_ ,” she insisted. 

He reached over and scooped her up, helping her up, letting her stand on him so she was tall enough now to see out the window. She’d been born and raised in the desert, so even the grasslands of Hennigan’s Stead this spring had been a revelation, and she’d missed most of Great Plains, and Tall Trees. Seeing the trees had to be a marvel for her. “See that?” He pointed to them rushing by, all the green of it. “Tree. Gonna see lots more of them in Canada, I expect.”

But she had eyes for something else, and let out a squeal of delight, reaching out and smacking the window excitedly with one tiny hand. “Daddy, Daddy, _caballos_!” 

Seeing the small herd of mustangs out in a meadow, gamboling and blowing off steam playfully before the train’s passing sent them scurrying, he couldn’t help but smile. An old echo there, so many years ago on the Texas prairies, and his own delighted excitement when he was two years old himself. His mother’s voice, kindly but still firm. _English, Arthur. It’s America we’re in now._

They were in America now indeed, and from there to Canada, and true, better they speak English. But his children spoke Spanish as naturally as English, and they hadn’t much discussed it yet, but maybe he and Sadie ought to teach them the Welsh too. “ _Caballos_ ,” he agreed with her. He couldn’t resist adding, “Or you could say _ceffylau_ ,” looking at Bea’s reflection for a moment in the window. Gold-tinged green eyes wide and drinking it all in.

She was so young yet. Turned two only a few months ago, and Mattie was just a year old. Bea was too young to hear much about even the grandmother she’d been named for and what few memories Arthur had of her, let alone all the weighty truth of his life before the turn of the century. That would all happen in time, he expected. But that was years in the future.

After a while of gazing out on the world, Bea climbed back down, and he couldn’t help pressing a soft kiss to the top of those messy blond curls as she settled back down beside him, humming tunelessly to herself. He glanced upward for a second. _Hope you see this, Momma. She’s something, ain’t she? Both of them are._

He looked across the aisle to where Sadie sat with little Mattie tucked against her chest, fast asleep. She joked their boy had gotten that ability to sleep hard and easily from him. Karen was in the next seat up with Danny, and spinning her son some kind of yarn about dragons and unicorns and the like. 

The whole business of uprooting and moving to Canada for the summer with three adults, a pair of two-year-olds, a one-year-old, three horses, and an annoyed cat and anxious dog, had been no small production. Dido and Dusty weren’t too happy to be kept in the stable car, he was sure, but there was nothing else for it, and they sure as hell weren’t leaving them for several months. Not that he didn’t trust Pedro and Juanita with them, but it wouldn’t have been fair. Plus they’d have been sorely missed. 

It would have been even harder, though, in springs past, once they finished their seasonal work for the MacFarlanes. Two years ago, Bea had been only a few months old, and Danny only weeks old. Last year, they both were a year old, but then Mattie was a newborn himself. Too fragile and helpless to travel so far, especially with changing over on probably a half-dozen trains. This was the first chance they’d really had since Felipe released him from the tender embrace of the Cactus, and he could leave Mexico for a long period of time, that it was somewhat possible to go see Charles, and the Wapiti, as he’d promised years ago. Not easy still, even so, given the children fussed and it was no easy thing keeping them entertained, but he wasn’t going to wait until Mattie was five or six.

Sadie put Mattie down, tucking him securely under his blanket, and raised an eyebrow at him, gesturing towards the back of the car. Leaving Bea drowsing, he obliged, heading back there. “Be able to stretch our legs in a few hours in Valentine,” she said with a consoling tone, leaning one arm against the back wall of the train car. “Do the kids good, at that. We was through everything so far in such a rush.”

“Sure, but less time spent in Valentine, the better,” he said wryly, leaning against the wall himself on the other side of the door, crossing his arms. They’d been all right in Blackwater, but he was of no mind to push his luck too much.

“We got through Blackwater OK,” she pointed out, as if reading his mind.

“I know. I’d as soon not push our luck and get careless, though. Few more years and things will fade even more, maybe, but...” He shook his head, letting out a sigh. “Last damn thing I ever want Bea and Mattie to see is their daddy getting arrested and dragged off to be hanged.”

She looked at him, brows furrowing for a moment. She didn’t have to say it. That was a risk they’d accepted--because Sadie had chosen it too in being with him, in having children with him--but that didn’t mean it didn’t lurk sometimes at the back of his mind, even so. A higher concern right now than it had been, and he realized why. “Sorry. Guess I’m just nervous. Heading back that way for the first time since it all happened.” Too many memories and ghosts. 

She reached out, put a hand on his arm, looking at him. Said nothing, just keeping her gaze steady on his, but there was nothing that needed saying. They weren’t alone. They had each other, and Karen too, and so they’d get by. He reached out with his free hand, putting it over hers for a moment. She nodded, then letting go, giving him a slight smile. 

He was about to sit down again when the train’s brakes squealed, and he felt the sudden jolt of the train slowing. Seeing Sadie dive for Bea, lying there on the bench seat, he managed to get to Mattie in case the change in speed threw the kids forward and off the seat. But it was a controlled stop. Enough of a jolt that the boy stirred, looking up at Arthur, eyes wide, face scrunching up in alarmed confusion. Reaching down, picking him up and holding him close, feeling the rapid flurry of Mattie’s heart, he murmured low words of comfort, jogging him up and down a bit while walking up the aisle of the train car, trying to soothe the scared little boy’s cries.

All the while he couldn’t help but glance out the window, and he finally gave it up, unable to help it. Opening the train door, he stepped out onto the small platform of the car, leaning out to try to catch a better view. Realizing he was still clutching his son, and at the same time, his free hand resting firmly on the revolver on his right hip. Seeing the conductor walking down the tracks, he called, “What’s the trouble then?”

“Tree across the tracks. We’ll get it cleared quick enough, never you fear, but you might as well sit tight for the time being.” The man looked up at him, seeing him holding a small child, and gave a smile. “Sudden stop gave your little one a fright, did it?” Mattie turned his face into Arthur’s shoulder, shyly avoiding looking at the conductor. 

“Did at that. Tree just fell, you think? I run into it once where bandits used that ploy to stop a train.” They’d done it themselves, up in Montana, to stop a train fresh out of the goldfields. Used it a few times on stagecoaches too, at that.

“No signs of saw marks,” the conductor assured him. He sensed Sadie close behind him, and she stepped forward in front of him, reached out to take Mattie from him. He handed the boy over, and she tucked him on her hip.

“No trouble, then?” she called.

“No, ma’am, just likely to be several hours till we can get a horse team here from Strawberry. Gotta dispatch a rider, and then bring the team up.”

“Making us sitting ducks if any outlaws is looking for an easy score,” Arthur muttered to her. She nodded idly, not looking back at him. “We could outfight just about any of them, mind.” They’d stopped bounty hunting after Sadie got pregnant, lived much quieter lives, and aside from a few pain in the ass Del Lobos trying to start something out in the desert, they’d left the battles and bullets and killing behind them. Karen too, at that. It had been a good life, but if pressed, he knew he could kill again easily enough. He’d been a killer, so had she, and that was a bridge crossed and burned. 

“Sure. But no need to leap right to killing, I’d say.” He had to agree with her there. If there was no choice, he’d opt for blood, but he wasn’t that stupid bastard anymore who lived constantly poised on the edge of violence. She wasn’t the reckless death-dealer she’d been either. She raised her voice, hailing the conductor again. “Got eight horses in that stable car when we was loading, and three of them belonging to my husband, his sister, and me. I’d think other folk would be willing to lend their horses to the task so we ain’t rolling into Valentine well after dark.”

“You talk other folk into pitching in on that effort,” the conductor replied, “and I’d be grateful.” 

Heading back into the car, Karen looked up at them, her arm around Danny. “Trap?” she asked Arthur.

She would know how that worked, given she’d lived that life too since she was a kid. “Don’t think so,” he answered. “Just fallen timber. Gonna try to get other folk to lend their horses to the clearance effort. You mind if we put Queenie to it?”

“Sure,” she answered, reaching her arms out for Mattie. “Give the boy here.” Arthur obliged, handing him over. She looked at Bea and smiled. “You come sit with Aunt Karen a bit, all right, Bea?” Bea nodded, and Karen helped her up onto the seat where she plunked herself down beside Danny.

“My seat,” he protested.

She eyed him, and Arthur sensed in a second she’d probably be pulling at that dark hair of his. Karen intervened. “You be nice, Daniel Jones.”

Sadie nudged him with her hip in passing, nodding towards the cars further forward. Yeah, Karen had it well in hand, so he followed her.

Seemed everyone was eager to be on the way, so it was no hard task to convince other folks with horses in the stable car to lend them to the railroad for a short while. He spared a few pats for Dusty in the stable car, muttering an apology that he couldn’t stay longer, and went for the first horse, a white-blazed chestnut belonging to some stockman on his way to Valentine.

Getting the horses led down from the car and up to the engine, then harnessed to the massive oak tree across the tracks, it wasn’t as smooth as it would have been with a well-matched team. Bob, Buell, and Queenie were used enough to each other to pull together in harness, given they’d been hitched to a wagon in pairs with each other more than once, but the rest were strangers. Plus none of them were heavy draft horses ideal to this kind of work. But with plenty of coaxing and encouragement, the horses found the way of it, and cleared the tree enough to let the train pass. 

He patted Buell’s flank while leading him back. “Good boy.” Buell let out a low grunt at that, plodding back into his stall without protest, moving more slowly in his exhaustion. Arthur sighed, giving him another pat, and a beet for a treat. He’d seen Buell was no spring chicken already when he’d first found him with Hamish’s leg in the stirrup, but he figured another few years, and his friend would have to start easing off. “Maybe we find you a nice mare,” he said to Buell, teasing him. “Seems I’m proof you can get a late start and have it come out right in the end, huh?” 

Heading back to the ramp, he caught the rope halter around Bob’s neck, Sadie passing it to him. “You checked the time?” he asked. When he came back from putting Bob away, the aisle narrow enough to only manage one horse at a time, she shook her head. “We ain’t making our train in Valentine.”

He sighed, shaking his head. “Nothing for it. We’ll just have to catch the next one. Argue for them to transfer us without charging us the second fare while we’re at it.” Every penny counted these days. 

She cocked an eyebrow. “If we gotta stay in town--”

Unexpected expense, plus not wanting to stick around too long. Too much for him to fuss about that moment. “Worry about it when we get there, see the situation.” He reached for Queenie’s halter next. 

They pulled into Valentine two and a half hours late, and missed their next train by seventeen minutes, by the station clock. There was another train out, so at least they’d be able to leave tonight. “Leave it to me,” Karen said with a smug grin, nodding towards the ticket agent. 

“What’s your plan?” he asked her.

“Our poor sick brother Charles,” she said.

He watched her go to the counter, and soon enough she was sobbing her way through a story about heading north with all the family to bid farewell to said Poor Sick Brother, dying of tuberculosis. He didn’t wince at that. She hadn’t been at Las Hermanas, and she’d been drunk for most of his sickest days at Beaver Hollow. Besides, he couldn’t flinch every time someone talked about TB, or the damn disease would still rule his life.

“We got me, my brother and his wife, our babies--all of us going to bid farewell to dear sweet Charles. Sir, it’s a long journey to Canada, and we ain’t got money to spare. No fault of ours the train got delayed in Big Valley. Take pity on an unfortunate widow, won’t you?” 

“She’s impressive,” Sadie muttered, keeping an appropriately glum expression, though he could hear her trying to not laugh.

“You never did see her on a job,” he replied, equally in an undertone.

Karen came back, tickets in hand. “That gentleman not only understood our circumstances, he upgraded us to sleeper accommodations, no less, can you imagine?”

“Such a kind fella,” Sadie said, nodding towards him with a smile.

“Momma,” Bea said, grabbing Sadie’s hand, “gotta go.”

Sadie sighed. “I’ll handle that. Karen, you want to go with me after that, get us all some food?” She eyed Arthur. “Best you stay put with the children, I suppose.” Sheepishly, he nodded at that. 

That business all accomplished, they gathered again out on the platform. It was a mild spring evening, and little more than an hour for the next train headed north to Cheyenne, so better to not wander too far anyway. Heading for the platform again, he told Karen, letting himself give way to amusement, “You still got it.”

Karen shrugged, “Wasn’t like they was gonna sell all them sleeper car tickets anyway. And with the kids and all, be nice to actually sleep lying down and have some space.”

He laughed at that. “True.” 

Sitting on the benches, they improvised some sandwiches out of bread, cheese from the general store, and some roast beef Karen bought at Smithfield’s. 

Best he not go back to Smithfield’s. He might not be recognized, given the time that had passed, and his looks had changed enough that he looked like just another anonymous dusty cowboy passing through, he imagined. 

But more than that, he’d go there and remember that fistfight with Tommy Lennox, and Thomas Downes stopping him from the worst savage depths of his own temper. He’d remember Lenny too, and that crazy night they’d had, full of mayhem and laughter and all sorts of affectionate brotherhood.

Nineteen, shot down senselessly in that debacle of a bank robbery, and buried out in Bluewater Marsh, alongside Hosea. He’d seen the graves riding south to Doyle’s that day to meet Sadie. Cole MacFarlane had died here in Valentine that year too, though he hadn’t been there for it--just a week or so after the shootout with Cornwall’s men, so they’d been settling in down at Clemens Point and avoiding Valentine like the plague.

Another loss for the MacFarlanes too, of late. It had been a hard spring for them, grieving Ethan’s death last fall. Drunk as anything one night, he’d gone out into the pastures and apparently tried to milk a bull. Only nineteen, he’d been, not terribly bright like Lenny, but he’d never get the chance to be a drunk or a fool again or anything else.

Young lives still got cut stupidly, senselessly short. Some things never changed, no matter how much he or his own life had changed. The way of the world, he supposed. Senseless sorrow and brutality right along the beauty and generous goodness. But he could at least see so much more of the latter now.

He let himself focus on the fine things. The lovely spring evening, a good cup of coffee to finish his sandwich. Dusty lying down, tied to the bench for now, his head on his paws, tail thumping merrily away at Arthur’s petting him. Bea and Danny scooted up, obviously interested, but Danny went right for Dusty’s somewhat fluffy tail. He had another flicker of memory at that. Something back in Armadillo or Tumbleweed or Phoenix or who knew where, but some dusty desert town, sitting on a porch and teaching a couple of littler kids to be nice to a stray dog they all were petting. Pleading with his mother to bring the dog to California, wanting to keep her so badly, but having to leave her behind. He got a hand between Danny and the dog’s tail. “Gotta be nice to Dusty,” he told them, leaning down, showing them the way of it. “Dido too.” Dido was stuck with the luggage in her box, and none to happy about it. He expected she’d be pissed off for a few days in Canada.

Another train arrived, from Chicago by the signboard, and bound next for Rhodes and St. Denis. Letting the passengers from that disembark, a flood of people either getting off here or stretching their legs and relieving themselves before getting on the train again, he paid them little mind.

At least until he heard a gasp and a startled, almost delighted cry, looking up at the sound of it. “Oh, my, it _is_ you!”

~~~~~~~~~~

She’d been busy jotting down a song she’d heard some of the porters singing as they offloaded the luggage--a melancholy tune, and one she’d heard in Annesburg once in part when they’d been up at Beaver Hollow, so she wanted to get it recorded now before she lost it again.

She’d just finished scribbling it when she heard the familiar voice, and looked up to see Mary-Beth Gaskill standing there, valise in hand, eyes shining bright with excitement. “Mary-Beth,” Karen said first, rising from the bench, giving a small, happy laugh, moving forward to give the woman a hug.

Arthur next, and then Sadie did as well. She looked Mary-Beth over. She looked well indeed. She was--what, twenty-five or so now? The last bits of girlishness fading from her, and she was stylish and natty in that smart navy blue traveling suit. Sadie couldn’t help but feel a little bit of a scrub herself in her worn shirt and pants, dusty and with some soot smears from the train journey, plus a stain of milk from where Mattie had spit up on her shoulder after nursing.

Obviously her writing had done well for her. But she looked at Arthur first, smiling. “It’s all so strange being back here in Valentine, isn’t it? You look real well, Arthur.”

“Wouldn’t take much to look better than when you seen me last, I suppose,” he said, giving her that half-smile of his. “But I’m good, yeah.” 

Mary-Beth’s smile broadened at that. “I thought about all three of you often. Can’t tell you how lovely it is to see you like this now.” She glanced behind Karen now, seeing the kids there. “Oh, and who’s this now?”

“Uh, these two are ours,” Sadie said, gesturing to Bea and Mattie. “Beatrice and Robert, but he goes by his middle name--Matthew. Just didn’t seem like a ‘Bobby’ once we met him.” Matthew had been her father’s middle name too, so it seemed fair, and she knew it was Arthur’s own way of honoring Hosea as well.

“This boy’s mine,” Karen said, hefting Danny into her arms. She gave Mary-Beth a knowing glance. “Daniel. His daddy ain’t around no more.”

Mary-Beth nodded at that, acknowledging it with a simple, “Ah,” after glancing at Karen’s left hand and the fake wedding ring still there. “So very sorry for your loss.” But she gave Karen a sly smile as she said it.

Karen laughed. “He ain’t sorely missed.” Sadie heard the understated sisterhood of years in that, the sort of thing she and Karen had developed since Tesoro Azul, but which she’d envied the girls in camp, both younger and tight-knit as they’d been.

“Tilly and me didn’t like leaving you behind,” Mary-Beth told her.

“You asked me to come with you. I said I wouldn’t, so no blame from me for you heading out without me. Though drunk as I was, I don’t remember clear what I said. I’m sure it was nothing nice.”

“You called us a pair of prissy prudish bitches and told us we’d gotten as joyless as Grimshaw,” Mary-Beth said, but with humor rather than rancor. 

Karen nodded at that. “I’m sorry for that.” 

“Of course.” Mary-Beth glanced at her watch, seeming almost anxious. “Good, my next train isn’t due in for another half-hour, so why don’t we sit, and oh, please, let’s talk, all of you.”

“Where you heading?” Arthur asked her as they sat down on the benches again.

“St. Denis. Tilly’s there too, we see each other often--she’ll be so happy to hear about this, and so jealous!”

“She’s well?” Karen asked.

“Oh, very. She’s been working as a secretary in a lawyer’s office.” Mary-Beth gave a gleeful smile. "One of the lawyers is very sweet on her. But where have you been all this time?”

“Mexico,” Sadie answered her. “We went there right after things, well, you know. For Arthur’s health. Met up with Karen a couple years later, just after we got married. So we all been staying in Chuparosa. Doing a little of this, a little of that. Trying to save for some land.”

Stretching every peso or dollar, and only the three-odd months of solid work each spring at MacFarlane’s had saved them thus far. The fact the season had been shorter this year wasn't good for that, though, and paying for this trip north had been a bit harder for it. She’d lived that life of tight finances in both Tumbleweed and Pinetre Gulch, and here they were, still getting by, but barely. And the news she’d got in Strawberry still sat heavy in her stomach, because it would make things even harder. Though she couldn’t complain too bitterly. The life they had together had plenty of joys.

“Mexico,” Mary-Beth breathed. “Seems so romantic, them stories you hear.”

“You always did think St. Denis was romantic too,” Karen said dryly, but the humor in it was fond rather than critical. “Mexico’s a place like any other. Got its beautiful things, got its pockets of shit. Good folk and bad.”

“Sadie came back and found me. Saved my life," Arthur said, giving her a smile. "We stuck together when we got down there, and, well, things just happened from there in time. You been writing, we saw. Read a particular book of yours that seemed familiar.”

“You picked up ‘Sunset Over the Red Sage’?” Mary-Beth said, brightening. “What did you think?” Sadie could see from the way she eyed them that she desperately hoped they’d liked it, and it gave her a strange feeling to see it. Successful and wealthy as Miss Leslie Dupont was, she hadn’t forgotten where she came from, or the people she’d loved.

“I liked it real fine,” Arthur assured her with a smile. “It was Sadie who was reading it first, though, and figured it out.”

“It was in a bunch of books he bought me when I was recovering from cholera,” Sadie told her. “Enjoyed it for sure. We bought ‘The Buccaneer’s Lady’ and ‘On Wild Shores’ too since then. We debated writing you at your publisher, but…”

Mary-Beth nodded, letting out a low sigh, playing nervously with her fingers. “I wish you would have,” she said. “No easy thing assuming you three was all likely dead, after the way it was when Tilly and Pearson and me left.”

“Sorry,” Arthur said. “We thought it better you not be troubled with all of...us.”

“Arthur Mo--” She cocked her head aside, looking at Arthur questioningly.

“Griffith,” Sadie supplied, sensing the question.

“Fine, then, Arthur _Griffith_. No trouble at all.”

“What happened with Pearson, then?”

“He shipped out from St. Denis, as a cook on a freighter. I get a letter from him now and again, from all sorts of strange places. Never Tahiti, though! Think he’s getting a yen to find himself a wife and settle down,” she said. She looked at Arthur, voice lowering, giving him a gleeful smile. “You’ll never believe who else I saw in St. Denis last month, right before I left for Chicago to meet with my publisher.” 

“Who’s that?”

“That Mary Linton.”

“She ain’t a going concern of mine, Mary-Beth,” Arthur said dryly, after only a split-second pause, giving Sadie a glance. She gave him a half-shrug. It didn’t bother her. She knew Mary Gillis Linton was no threat. She’d told Arthur goodbye, and he’d written Mary his own goodbye a while before he ever confessed he loved her. “We both said our well wishes and walked away from all that.”

“Oh, of course not. Seems you’ve found yourself the right gal here. You got so close so quick. And this fella? Never seen him hurry so much to spend time with a woman as I did with you. It was quite sweet, really.” She winked at Sadie, giving her a warm smile. “Always would have put my money on you two having some kind of grand romance. Glad to see I was right.” Sadie couldn’t help but smile back in return, though as usual, her rose-colored glasses tended to see everything in hues of romance. Neither she nor Arthur had been anything like courting back then, given the state both of them were in. She’d needed him as a friend right then, no further complications, and he’d needed her just the same way. They’d grown into being lovers, but much like with Jake, she’d always treasure having Arthur as her friend first. Meant that a lot of the storms of being married were weathered more easily with that friendship as a safe harbor, that was for sure. “Just thought you’d be interested to know she’s all right.”

“She’s well, then?” 

“Seemed it. She's Mrs. Barrett now, from what I could see. Married to one of the booksellers in town, Peter Barrett. She was walking out of the bookshop as I come in. Five books in her arms, cheeks all pink and eyes all starry, wearing a wedding ring, and so distracted that she didn’t even notice me. The way he looked at her, pretty obvious. Thought you might like to hear that.”

Arthur sat back at that, laughing. “Good on her.” Sadie couldn’t help a little smile herself at that.

“So where are you headed? Not to Mexico, then?”

“Canada. Going to see Charles, and the Wapiti tribe.”

“Give Charles my best, then. He always seemed such a deep and kind fella. You ain’t heard nothing from anyone else?”

“Afraid not.” The time passed far too quickly, and the train whistle blew then to signal the southbound passengers for St. Denis. Mary-Beth reached into her valise, grabbing a notebook and a fountain pen. “I still have it,” she told Arthur with a lighthearted laugh. “Do all my best writing with it.”

“Well, how about that,” he answered with a chuckle of his own.

She scribbled something on a sheet of paper in her notebook, and tore it out, handing it to Karen. “There’s my address in St. Denis. Do write me, all of you, and if you’d like to write Tilly, send that letter to me too and I’ll get it to her--I don’t recall her address rightly, I’m afraid.” Then she reached into her bag again, pulling out a red-leather bound volume that Sadie recognized, and then another one, in brown leather.

“It’ll be published next month,” she said, scrawling on the title page, and handing it to Arthur after blowing on the ink to help it dry. “Leslie Dupont’s latest! ‘The Scarlet Ribbon’. It’s about the French Revolution and this dashing young revolutionary and a lady poet. It’s all ridiculous nonsense, I suppose, but oh, what fun it is to write.” 

“Ain’t nonsense in bringing some fun to folks’ lives,” Arthur answered her, his tone gentle. 

She looked at her and Arthur, smiling. “I may have to write my publisher with an idea for another book. Seems I hurried to turn Adam and Sophie into a tragedy. I’ve had plenty of readers writing me hoping for another story that gives them a happy ending, but I never could see how they got out of all that alive. I should have figured. Love’s the best of things, isn’t it? Of course them two would find a way in the end.”

Sadie felt herself blushing at that, somewhat abashed at the idea of being cast as some epic romantic heroine. It had been easier not thinking about everyone else reading “Sunset Over The Red Sage”, let alone being moved by some version of her seen through Mary-Beth’s eyes. “Guess we did,” she said, feeling Arthur’s arm slip around her waist, and unable to help but smile at it. Nothing to be embarrassed by in loving him, or him loving her. 

Then with one last wave from the door of the train, Mary-Beth was gone, and they sat to wait in the gathering dusk for their own train, comforted by knowing that Mary-Beth, Tilly, and even that cantankerous bastard Pearson had come out of it OK. “I can’t figure living in St. Denis,” Arthur said, shaking his head, as Karen took Danny and Bea for the outhouse. Mattie stayed sleeping quietly on Sadie’s lap.

“Them gals had different notions of what they wanted,” Sadie answered him.

“I know that, it’s just that every time they pass by that bank, how can they--” He shook his head. “Though they wasn’t there that day. I suppose that makes a real difference.”

“We all got our ghosts, Arthur. Seems they dealt with the ones they got about that city. They’re happy.”

“Made out damn fine, by the sound of it. Better than us, even.” He glanced carefully at her. “I ain’t saying they’re happier. Just sounds like they ain’t gotta worry about money, neither of them. We get by, sure, but we gotta find something more solid by the end of the year. Drew’s hoping to expand in a couple of years to hire more folk year round, sure, but we ain’t gonna make it that long.”

She froze for a moment. She should tell him. Jake keeping it from her all that time clearly did no favors. “It’s gotta be by the end of summer, I think,” she said, hearing the rasp of emotion in her voice. “It’s the most frustrating Goddamn thing, honey, it shouldn’t be a concern of yours, but it’s tied to me, so it is…”

“What you going on about? You can just say it.”

“Chip Cooper at the general store didn’t say when we was last in Strawberry three years back, out of respect for hearing Jake was killed. He’s a kind sort. This time, though--when I stopped in today to get some things for the trip before we caught the wagon to Riggs Station? Jake handled our bills, on account of me handling more of the hunting and whatnot. Seems we was in debt from all the stuff we needed to set up a home, because Chip gave Jake credit so we wasn’t headed up into the mountains unprepared, especially with it being fall already, and then that next spring when we bought livestock.”

Arthur had gone stone still, obviously shocked at the news. He finally spoke. “That fella swindle you, pad the bill, sell you shit you didn’t need?” At her questioning look, he gave her a sharp smile with little amusement in it. “Sadie, I learned about every con and hustle there is from Hosea, and that one’s not even illegal.”

She shook her head. “He’s an honest man. I saw the bills.” Jake’s signature on them, crisp and undeniable. “He didn’t even try to charge no interest, eight years on. Chip, he’s that sort. Might take it out of the hide of city slickers, but homesteaders? No. I don’t think he even wanted to bring the debt up now, but--”

“But the amount of it means he can’t let it go,” Arthur said, a grim note entering his voice, and he hunched forward, elbow on his knees, head in his hands. She hated seeing it, hated even more being the cause of it. “How bad is it?”

“We paid off some of it each year, but there’s still a hundred ninety-four dollars and eighteen cents owing,” she said miserably, shaking her head. “I knew Jake and me was low on money after buying the land, and buying a wagon down in Blackwater, but I didn’t know it was so bad as all that.”

She knew full well that two hundred dollars was a good chunk of what savings she and Arthur had left from the money left from that financially fatter years between the robbery jobs in 1899, and the bounties they’d hunted back in the first months of 1901. They’d been lucky to spend very little in 1900, living at Las Hermanas, but the last three years hadn’t come cheap, especially with the inability to do a lot of jobs with small kids. And it wasn’t as though they’d make much, if any money, this summer up in Canada. Rains Fall’s latest letter had made it clear they were coming north to Minnewakan as his guests, though, so at least they wouldn’t be spending either.

“Well,” Arthur said finally, still not quite looking at her. “Guess he at least did you the courtesy of telling you rather than sending a debt collector. Lenders will sic a bully-boy on someone for far less than two hundred. I should know.” 

“I didn’t know. He never told me. I assumed we’d had to take a bit of store credit, a lot of folk do in getting started out together, but I figured we’d paid it off already, hard as we was working, and when Chip never said anything to me three years back. But...it ain’t fair to you, inheriting debts from my first marriage.”

“No rhyme or reason sometimes, what happens. Fairness don’t always enter into it,” Arthur replied, sitting back upright, and now looking over at her, his eyes more inscrutable than she’d like. “The man’s rightly owed, you say. Been plenty patient about it too. That’s what matters.”

“I’m sorry,” she said around a lump in her throat. The thing that hurt too, and that she couldn’t burden Arthur with right now, given she’d hit him with that shock, was knowing that Jake had kept it from her. Well-meaning, of course, not wanting to worry her with fretting over the idea of debt dogging them out of this new home she’d come to love so much, and it hadn’t been much of a secret. 

Though it must have gotten harder to keep, given how bad the last months of 1898 and first months of 1899 had been between bandits and animals. They wouldn’t have made much progress. Still, two, three more years up there, they’d have been fine, though she had to wonder if Jake would have told her how bad it still was when she would have pushed so hard for having a child in 1899 as she’d planned, letting her know it needed to wait another year or so. She could imagine it would have been one hell of a fight between them at that point. She’d been careless herself in not worrying about the accounts or questioning them, and true, she’d kept a secret from him too about the rift with Caroline. But his was a secret that cut painfully deep now, and it cut into this new marriage of hers as well. It would have been nothing, given time to resolve the debt, but Jake’s death had caught her up in it, and now that helplessly dragged Arthur into it, and their kids too. That was what hurt the most.

“Could go rob the bank here in Valentine,” he said, with a sort of black humor. “Karen and me done it once already, and I’d judge you could replace both Lenny, green as he was, and Bill, dumb as he was. Have to hide the kids, of course.” 

She looked at him, not sure if he was even a tiny bit serious. “Only joking,” he reassured her, reaching out and putting a hand on her knee. “We’ll pay it, Sadie. Gonna figure things out. If that’s the worst mistake you got left outstanding from before we met, you’re doing better than me yet.”

She couldn’t resist a small chuckle, grateful he’d managed to cut it down to something manageable with the humor, and made sure she knew they’d handle it together. She put her hand over his, trying to keep that guilt from stabbing her too deeply. “Thanks. I didn’t want to keep it from you.” 

He nodded in acknowledgment of that, and rose to greet Karen, reaching for Bea. “Ah, there’s my girl!” Just then, the train came into view from the south, pulling into the station. 

Tucked into a sleeper car for the next leg of the journey north on an overnight train, the kids settled, she couldn’t help but be grateful when she felt Arthur reach for her in their small bunk, gathering her into his arms, obviously sensing she needed the comfort of it. She brushed a kiss across his cheek in thanks, and managed to drift off to sleep.

The cycle of trains, train stations, saloons and quick cheap eateries, watching the kids and the animals, and the occasional stagecoach or wagon ride, repeated itself until it felt like one hazy blur, scenery changing from deserts to plains to forests to mountains to forests to mountains to plains again, stopping at the Canadian crossing at Crossing Creek in the middle of the night to verify who they were and what they were doing crossing the border, and they’d had to do this too at Manteca Falls in January on their way to MacFarlane’s. Apparently things were tightening down, one more bit of government oversight. But they got through with minimal fuss, barely more than a glance by the bureaucrats, and continued on.

The kids slept still as they headed north, the sun rising, so she, Karen and Arthur sat on one bunk, talking quietly. “So this is New Caledonia,” Karen said, nodding out the window. “Nice enough place.”

“Spirit Lake’s a real sight,” Sadie said, eyeing the flat mirror of it, stretching out endlessly along the tracks. “I ain’t seen big waters like that since our days on Flat Iron.” 

Arthur gave a soft, comfortable sounding little laugh at that. “We never did get to the coast down in Mexico. We should go sometime, somewhere. See the ocean.”

“Just no hopping a boat to Tahiti,” Karen said dryly. She looked at the two of them. “You ever wonder where Micah ended up? Ain’t heard nothing of him.”

“We ain’t lucky enough for him to have ended up in hell,” Arthur answered her. “I’m sure the bastard’s probably causing trouble somewhere.”

“Australia, perhaps. He and Dutch was always going on about it, towards the end. They sure would have had the money, after that last train.” She’d heard them rambling about it, dreaming big dreams about sheep farming in some unspoiled wilderness or whatever. As if they’d actually do that. She couldn’t resist quipping, “If they’re there, maybe they know what the hell that ‘Waltzing Matilda’ song is all about?” Karen snickered at that. 

Arthur looked at Sadie, raising an eyebrow. “Before you ask, no, I got no notions of chasing off to Australia to find him, assuming he’s even there. Canada’s adventure enough for me just now.”

The train finally pulled into the station at Banner, and the whole process of collecting kids, horses, the cat and dog, and the luggage they had, including some heavier clothing purchased in Strawberry--making damn sure she paid Chip in full--took its share of time. A faint breeze stirred now, a cool and pretty spring day, and she breathed in the smell of it, a northern woodland that reminded her of Ambarino. Flat grasslands in some ways like Hennigan’s Stead, but so much further north, and here and dappled with forest too.

Glancing down the street, Banner seemed to be a decent little going concern, a town rather than a trading post, roughly about the size of Valentine, and with the same feel of being a little raw and rough around the edges, comfortable rather than genteel. A doctor for sure, a general store, a Royal Canadian Mounted Police outpost with a scarlet-jacketed Mountie walking in the door--well, they’d have time to explore later, maybe. 

“There’s our fella,” Karen said, putting a hand on Sadie’s shoulder and pointing at the wagon, and Charles coming back from the general store, a hefty sack easily thrown over his shoulder, and obviously more to load too to judge from the pile of crates, sacks, and boxes on the porch. “Getting some shopping done here in town while he was waiting on us.”

“Hey, shopping can be some adventure,” Arthur said, giving Sadie a wink, and leaning down to lift Bea into his arms, looking at her. “Let’s stop being a bunch of gawkers and go say hello to Mister Charles, what do you say, Bumblebea?”

“Hi!” she obliged, waving at Arthur, and he just laughed, heading down the steps towards Charles.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Sadie’s Journal**

 **Tune and lyrics for “In the Pines”**  
Collection Notes: “Heard railroad workers singing this one up near Valentine, and bits of it in Annesburg back when we was up there last. Folk from Scarlett Meadows and Bluewater Marsh, they was.”

Personal Notes: “Bit of a melancholy gruesome piece of work, decapitation and all, so is the thought that trains are some kind of bringer of doom? All about trains and sadness. Trains tear up the land, and they do take folk far away from home and all. The price of relentless progress, ain’t it? Part of me is missing Chuparosa already. The peace we had there, the quiet way of things. It’s been some of the happiest years of my life. But the troubles was there all the same. Can’t dodge the reality of things by hiding away from them.”

 **Tune and lyrics for “Waltzing Matilda”**  
Collection Notes: “Bought the music for this when we passed through Minneapolis since Karen and me thought it looked fun. Some big hit with ranchers in Australia, so we heard.”

Personal Notes: “Seems it ain’t about dancing and a girl named Matilda like I thought, and I confess I got little notion what some of these lyrics are actually about. Lots of Australian slang. But it’s a pretty tune all the same. Mattie in particular seems to like it real fine as a lullaby. Here’s hoping it ain’t actually all about murder.” 

**Arthur’s Journal**  
( **Sketch of an excited Bea looking out the train window** , captioned, “Spotted some caballos. Seems my little girl is as horse crazy as I was at that age. Perhaps I still am.”)

( **Sketch of Mattie and Danny asleep together on the train** )

( **Sketch of Sadie holding Bea and singing to her, little musical notes around the two of them** )

( **Sketch of Banner’s main street, captioned “BANNER. Welcome to New Caledonia.”)**


	34. Minnewakan: A Home Where The Bison Once Roamed

She watched Arthur striding across the street, Bea held on his hip, to go greet Charles, and saw the way the other man’s face lit up to see him. Taking Mattie, she stood back a bit, watching the two of them. The hug of greeting was awkward, a bit sideways, so as not to squash Bea, but the soft smile on Charles’ face as he crouched a bit to greet her said everything. She saw the way he looked at Arthur, obviously marking the changes in him since the Grizzly Ridge reservation. 

He came to her next, and she put an arm out for a hug too. Given what they’d been through together in those frantic weeks with the boys missing on Guarma, that was a bond that stuck. “You both look good,” he said, complimenting them, giving her a genuine smile. “I knew from your letters things were happy, but it shows.” 

She couldn’t help but smile at that. “Yeah. We been lucky.” For the most part, anyway. She looked Charles over with equal care. He was about thirty-five now, a few years younger than her, and the first lines had appeared around his eyes, but he looked well himself, strong and hale. He’d grown his hair back out from where he’d half-shaved it in the buggy, muggy Lakay swamps. But she’d seen him with a full head of hair that year before that, so that wasn’t the change.

Something about him though--no, it wasn’t noticing a difference, it was actually the lack of it. That world-weary wariness was still in those dark eyes just the same as it had been, and the hints of it she’d seen in his letters. That hit her with a curious pang of sympathy, maybe even pity. Not much had changed for him in four and a half years, it seemed, when so much had changed for her and Arthur, and even Karen. 

Mattie gave him a shy wave, then buried his face in Sadie’s shoulder again. “He’s so young, he don’t know what to make of strangers just yet,” she said apologetically, holding him tight. “But from what we saw at MacFarlane’s, give him a few days, maybe a week, and he’ll be giddy as a spring lamb to see you.”

“Sure enough.” He looked to where Karen had stepped up beside them. “Uh, Miss Jones.” He suddenly sounded stiffer, a bit more formal, offering her his hand rather than a hug of greeting. Sadie eyed the situation for a moment, deciding it was awkwardness rather than any kind of tension between them. He’d never written Karen directly, only sending general well wishes to her in his letters to Arthur and Sadie.

“Come on now, it’s _Karen_ ,” Karen told him, shaking her head. “Maybe we wasn’t as close as you and Sadie got back in the bad old days, but really, Charles, ain’t no need to make it sound like some prissy debutante ball.” She leaned in, giving him a wink. “You don’t gotta send a calling card to say ‘hi,’ neither,” she quipped. “Ain’t got no silver tray to put them on anyhow.” 

Charles laughed at that, shaking his head, his demeanor brightening, and the awkwardness fading. “OK then. That’s Danny, huh?”

Greetings done, they tucked the kids onto the seat of the wagon for the moment, helping Charles with the loading of the supplies, and their luggage besides. “Best to make tracks if we want to get to Minnewakan before dusk,” Charles said. 

“Sure. Any danger on the roads, aside from darkness?” she asked him.

“Some animals, some bandits.” He gave a half shrug. “About the same as anywhere, right?”

Putting the kids in back on a pallet, Dido as well in her crate, the wagon was obviously too crowded for three adults besides, so Sadie eyed the wagon. “You wanna help Charles drive?” she asked Karen.

Getting Bob and Buell quickly saddled up, and letting Dusty loose to follow, they met the wagon again. Charles hauled up into the seat with ease, offering Karen a hand up. Hesitating only a moment, she grabbed it, then turned, asking the kids, “All right, off on another adventure, you ready for this?”

“Yeah!” Danny piped up excitedly, head peeping up above the wagon box for a moment, giving a bright smile. Sadie smiled at him. Sometimes it wasn’t the easiest thing to see her sister’s boy, with his dark brown hair and blue eyes and bright, ready smile. Danny also had fawn skin as legacy, along with that dark hair, from whoever in Tesoro Azul had fathered him, though it freckled in the sun like Karen’s. Darker than Jake’s, and dark enough to be clear that the purported dearly departed “Mr. Jones” had been no white man, though people in Chuparosa asked no questions on that. Karen had eyed the one Americano stupid enough to ask if said dead Mr. Jones had been an Indian given a white name, snapped, “Ain’t none of your Goddamn business, mister,” and that was that. 

But all the same, the echo was there in Danny of that child she and Jake might have had. But that reminder faded greatly the first time she saw Bea, and cast her future firmly onto this path, this child. She moved her gaze from Danny to Mattie, too young yet to show much of himself, wondering if he’d stay so shy and sweet as he was, hoping in some ways he would, worrying in others that if he did, the world would be too harsh for nurturing that kindness as it had for Arthur for so long. She could see that lost future in Danny, but when she needed only to look a little ways away to see Bea and Mattie, so real, there was no need to pine for things that she could now never know. It was only the tiniest pang every now and again, those reminders of Jake, a single stitch of black sorrow cropping up again amidst all the bright and happy ones forming the shape of her life. 

Though that damn debt had certainly made for a hell of a reminder of her old life, and she could only be thankful Arthur seemed to have taken it as well as he had. They’d figure it out, somehow.

Heading north along the lakeshore, seeing the shine of the late afternoon sun on the small breeze-rippled crests on the water, she asked Charles, “I’m minded of how Lake Isabella was, so I’m guessing it’s too cold to swim?” She shot Arthur a look, and a bit of a smile. He winked back at her. They’d been back to Lake Don Julio once, a few months after Bea was born, before heading south to Chuparosa again with the work at MacFarlane’s done for the season. She had to wonder if Mattie was the result of that particular afternoon, though of course there was no way to know for sure. They’d decided to try for another baby almost immediately, neither of them getting any younger, and it took a couple of months, her nursing Bea as she was. But they hadn’t had a good chance to swim since. The banks of the San Luis had gotten too dangerous with Del Lobos, it seemed, and they’d been so busy besides.

“No, Spirit Lake is shallow enough that it gets warm enough in June, July for it,” Charles replied, handling the reins with ease, both man and horses obviously familiar enough with the road to pay too much mind to it. “But you sure don’t want to go for a dip now.” He cracked a small smile. “Real change from the Mexican desert, huh?” He gestured with one big hand. “Big lake, tall trees, cool spring weather…”

“Big change for me going from New Austin to Ambarino,” she answered him. “Don’t mean it was a bad one. New Caledonia’s real pretty, from what we seen here already.”

“Good fishing?” Arthur asked Charles.

“Good fishing, good hunting,” Charles answered. “Where the people are allowed it, anyway. We do all right here, just about. Better than at Grizzly Ridge, anyhow.”

“Wouldn’t take much, at that,” Arthur said with a sigh. “Though what you mean ‘where they’re allowed’?”

“Usual shit.” Charles swiveled a little in the seat, glancing back at the kids, then giving Sadie an apologetic glance. “Uh, sorry.”

“Nothing they ain’t heard,” she assured him dryly.

“Canadian government’s a bit better than the American one,” Charles said. “But they still keep pushing the Wapiti, and other tribes too. Fishing and hunting’s...it’s not prohibited, but it’s discouraged. Keep us on the reserve, keep us dependent on government rations. It’s less violently done than it was in America, but still. Not massacring folk with bullets don’t mean it’s clean hands. Gotta _train_ Indians to be civilized Christian farming folk, you know.” His jaw tightened. “Some of the rations arrive late, or rotten. And Rains Fall can send me to Banner for things, cause I ain’t on the Wapiti tribal rolls, so I don’t need a written pass from the local Indian agent to leave the reserve. Being neither fish nor fowl's useful for something, I guess.”

“They used to do that to slaves visiting another plantation down South, before the war,” Arthur said with a weary sigh. “I heard that from an old freedwoman when I was a little kid, when my daddy and me was passing through Alabama.”

“Don’t seem much difference to me sometimes,” Charles said. “My daddy was a bas--” He cleared his throat. “A mean drunk, but he said once the plantation owners saw themselves as caring parents to slaves as some kind of foolish children they had to care for and teach, cause they was too dumb to know what was best. Said that was what the government was doing to the Indians too. Seems like he was a smart man in that, if nothing else.”

She saw Arthur’s lips tighten a bit, and the way he urged Buell on, obviously upset. She turned to Charles. “You didn’t say much of all that in your letters. Or Rains Fall.”

“You got your own problems,” Charles replied. “No point troubling you with a thing near two thousand miles away that’s government policy besides.” He gave a half-shrug of those broad shoulders. “It’s still a better life than down at Grizzly Ridge, as I said.”

“Uh, do we need this agent’s permission to be on the reservation?”

“It’s a reserve here in Canada, not a reservation,” Charles corrected her. “And no.” He gave a smile that looked a little more genuine. “The agent ain’t a bad man, mind. Frank Frazier. He’s kept me off the books all this time, listing me as some kind of assistant agent, I guess? Gives Rains Fall a pretty free hand where he can. He’s like to go hunt to drop off a few deer if the supplies are late. Turns a blind eye to vision quests and the like. I think he’d ignore the passes if it wasn’t for the fact some folk in Banner and elsewhere know to ask for them if they see an Indian out.”

“So this Frazier, decent man in a rotten system?” Karen asked, giving Charles a glance.

“Just about,” Charles acknowledged. “And a rotten system’s the only one left for an Indian anymore. Frazier tries, I guess, but...there’s too much pressure from above.” Another of those awkward shrugs. “Ottawa wants Indians painted white. White schooling, white language, white names, a white God, and white ways of life, and that’s that.”

The quietly matter-of-fact air in his tone hurt. “Anything we can do?” Arthur ventured carefully.

“Can’t fight the government,” Charles said, shaking his head. “We sure found that one out back in ‘99. No, the people remember you fondly enough, Arthur, and you too, Sadie. It’ll do Rains Fall some good to see you too. We’ll be happy enough for pleasant company.”

It was a beautiful journey for all that, the lake and the forests and the prairie, better than the remote barrenness that the American government in Washington had shoved the Wapiti into and called it their “home”. 

There was a signpost for the border of the reserve, warning in bold black letters, “MINNEWAKAN RESERVE. WARNING: No Hunting, Fishing, Mining, Farming, or Settlement, Without EXPRESS PERMISSION by Wapiti TRIBAL AUTHORITIES”. Someone obviously had taken exception to that notion, because there were a half-dozen bullet holes in the sign. 

Charles rolled the wagon past the sign without a glance at it. “The village is a few miles upshore yet,” he called. “It’s a pretty place, at least. Caught a monster sturgeon just last week right near the sweat lodge.” Sadie couldn’t help but smile at the warmth in his voice. 

Finally they came up on the village. She recognized the cabins were hastily built, much as her and Jake’s had been, chinks between the logs plastered with mud against the fierce northern winters. A few larger buildings, to what purpose yet, she wasn’t quite sure. What looked like a whitewashed schoolhouse, and a half-built church, to judge from the crude cross out from made from two logs bound together. 

“Well, here we are,” Charles said, parking the wagon. He nodded towards a cabin on the left. “Arthur, Sadie, you’ll be staying there.”

“You have cabins empty?” Karen asked.

“This one, anyway.” He hitched himself down from the wagon with one quick, smooth motion. “Bright Waters caught her husband Coyote Runs, well, running around with another woman. He came home to his stuff left outside the door. So he’s back in the bachelor bunks, and Bright Waters is back with her mother and Rains Fall. A woman can put her husband’s things out and that’s about all a divorce needs for the Wapiti, especially if they ain’t been married by a preacher. Rains Fall and Paytah are seeing if they can mend fences, but at least she packed his things rather than just throwing them out into the mud.” 

“A woman can be rid of a bothersome fella, just like that? Wapiti women sure got the right idea,” she said jokingly. Compared to the way the law said a man practically owned a woman, and she couldn’t divorce him for just about any damn reason, it seemed sensible.

Though she caught a flicker of something in Arthur’s expression as she glanced over at him, that downward and sidelong casting aside of his gaze that she didn’t see much these days, but she knew that old worried shadow all the same. “ _Annwyl,_ I didn’t ever mean I’d be done with you,” she told him gently, switching over to Welsh, since Karen would understand it in Spanish. It surprised her sometimes to see she could still hurt him like that, but the wounds of decades didn’t fade entirely. Wasn’t like he didn’t say something thoughtless sometimes too, and need to claim it and apologize. What mattered was the happiness between them, and it was true steel that they’d wrought that from, together.

Swinging down from the saddle, he gave her a smile, a little nod, acknowledging it, putting it aside and his expression brightening again as he headed for the wagon, scooping up Danny first, pretending to strain hard to pick him up, and then lowering him down to the ground carefully, as if he were a ton of bricks. “My God, Karen, your boy’s getting big. What you been eating anyway on this trip, Danny boy, that you gone and grown so much?” Danny giggled with delight, especially when Arthur stood back up, stretching out his back and wiping the back of his hand across his forehead in dramatic pantomime.

Karen laughed at that, coming over to take Danny’s hand, heading for the cabin Charles had indicated. “Come on, let’s go explore, huh?”

“Uh, Karen, actually you’re over here,” Charles said, pointing two cabins over. “The cabins are a bit small, so I thought it was better with you and your boy not trying to jam in with Arthur and Sadie and their kids.” Sadie couldn’t argue with that. The cabin was obviously built for a single family, even smaller than the house in Chuparosa. They’d had to turn some of the space downstairs into a room for the kids last summer, walling off the open-air porch down there. As was, the kids were sleeping in the same room now that Mattie was old enough to move out of her and Arthur’s room. That was fine for now, and Mattie and Danny could keep sharing as they got older, but Bea certainly might want some space of her own. The house that had been just fine when it was her, Arthur, and Dido and Dusty, now felt pretty cramped with Karen and three kids besides. Just one more thing to worry about.

“And whose place am I taking over?” Karen said, something cautious in her tone. ”I ain’t wanting to push local folk out, Charles, especially since I’m sure they need a place to stay.”

“No, don’t worry about it, Karen, it’s my cabin.”

Karen stopped in her tracks, looking at him, one fist resting on her hip. “For God’s sake. I’m not kicking you out of your house, Charles Smith.”

“I’m not making you and your boy sleep in a tent or whatever.”

She threw up her hands, giving an extravagant roll of her eyes. “What the hell’s wrong with sleeping in a tent? We all did. Even Abigail and Jack did.” Charles stared at her, obviously determined to be a gentleman. She stared right back at him. “Cabin’s big enough for us to share with you. From what you said in your letters to them two,” she jerked a thumb towards Arthur and Sadie, “you hunt for sure but you only stay fed cause of neighbor women cooking. You could use a woman around your place a few months so you don’t starve, so shut up and stop being a proud fool. We managed to share a camp just fine them years ago, so it ain’t like I’m worried you’re gonna try to sneak under the covers with me.” She gave a snort of derisive amusement. “Only one we worried about being a creep was Micah.”

Charles’ lips twitched up into a faint smile at that, and he nodded, acknowledging defeat. “Fair enough.” He pointed a finger at her. “I’m taking the floor, though. No argument on that. You’re my guest.” 

Karen laughed. “Yeah, OK.” 

Charles headed for his cabin, obviously intending to get Karen and Danny settled, and called over his shoulder, “Dinner at my cabin in about an hour, all right?” 

Sadie waved an acknowledgment of that, grabbing a bag from the wagon. Arthur winked at Sadie, saying in an undertone as he handed Mattie to her, “Think we should tell them that we proved two folk can share a bed for a few months, no funny business?”

She gave a playful push to his shoulder. “You know as well as I do that we both probably _wanted_ the funny business by that point, we just wasn’t ready to admit it.” Sometimes she wondered now how neither of them had just rolled over and reached out, admitting with a touch what was so hard to put into words, but the fear they’d both had in them of daring too much and hurting each other by it had been there, real as anything.

The cabin was tidy and clean, and Charles or somebody had obviously taken time and prepared it after the suddenly-divorced folks cleared out, because the bed was made with clean sheets and a wool trade blanket, a bison robe draped over the foot of it. Logs laid and ready in the fireplace. She glanced over her shoulder at Arthur, saying quietly, “We best go back to Banner tomorrow and get some food. It don’t feel right, our taking rations from the Wapiti if they’re getting by at best.” The money was tight, yes, but at least they had the luxury of going to the store without a damn written pass.

He sighed, taking off his hat, turning it around in his hands in a fidgeting sort of way, obviously thinking. Touched fingers to his brow, as if plucking the idea out physically, and nodded. “Sure. Though I think we gotta do it some, so we ain’t offending their kindness. Best thing I can think is that we pull our own weight. Go hunt, go fish, bring it back for it to be shared out. Same way it was back in the gang.”

She nodded at that, putting Mattie down on the bed. “They got a Pearson to handle that, some kind of commissary?”

He shrugged. “Find out, I suppose. Or else find out from Charles or Rains Fall the best way it’s done.”

“Arthur?” He glanced over at her. “It’s a good answer. Saves us money, saves everyone’s feelings, and maybe helps these folk out too. We can maybe hunt or fish without trouble, by the sound of it.” Sometimes he needed to hear some acknowledgment of his smarts like that openly. 

She saw the momentary glow in his eyes at the praise, and the faint smile of thanks that he gave her. “Sure. You taking care of Mattie, I expect?” He sat down on the bed, settling Bea on his knee. “So, little Bean, what you think of this place?”

She’d thought to go ahead and nurse Mattie before dinner, seeing he was fussy, but smelling that their son obviously needed his diaper changed, his own wrinkled nose matching hers, Sadie turned to deal with that task first with a sigh. At least he’d lasted since Banner on that. 

Eating in Charles’ cabin, seeing Danny obviously excited with the place, it felt good, one more piece of their torn-apart family reunited. “Saw Mary-Beth in Valentine, just happenstance,” Arthur mentioned to Charles. 

“She’s good?” Charles asked. “Knew she was doing OK from her writing from what you said, but how’d she look?”

“Doing well,” Karen answered him. Tilly’s in St. Denis too, being courted by some young lawyer. Said Pearson’s been back out at sea, at that. Hope his cooking’s improved.”

Charles gave another of his half-smiles. “I’m glad. They always was good folk.”

“Nothing of John, I assume?” Sadie asked him, knowing it was a thing that nagged at her and Arthur both still. “You’d said you’d kept an ear out, since Abigail said back then they was aiming to head up to the Klondike.” 

“I did, but nothing heard. Klondike’s a long way from here,” Charles pointed out, “and the gold rush fizzled out within a couple years. Most folk that bust out from that probably went back to Seattle first, not coming east through the rest of Canada.”

“Trust John Marston to jump from the mess we was in right into some harebrained get-rich-quick scheme,” Arthur said dryly. “Dutch never did make him learn about hard work.”

She felt a little compelled to defend them, or at least, Abigail. Or maybe Caroline too, given she and Harold had gone west for a gold rush of their own. “We all done foolish things when we was young. And I suppose after everything we all went through, it sounded like a grand adventure.”

“Probably did, at that,” Arthur admitted. 

“You two can’t talk,” Karen said, giving them a smirk. “Running off to Mexico together? Who’d have thought _you two_ would end up being the hopeless romantics of us all?”

“Shut up,” Arthur muttered, though he gave her a bit of a wry grin of acknowledgment. “Spending near half a year mostly in bed don’t exactly make for a grand adventure.”

“No, but in different circumstances, it’d be one hell of a honeymoon,” Karen said.

That set all of them off laughing helplessly, and when Bea piped up, “What funny, Momma?”, that got them going again.

“Nothing, baby,” Sadie said finally, “Aunt Karen’s just being silly.” But it felt good having all four of them around that table together, and she could see Charles brightening a little too throughout the evening.

Heading back to the cabin, they put the children to bed, and then lit a lantern, not quite ready to go to sleep just yet themselves. She lost herself in Mary-Beth’s latest, smiling to herself at the adventure of it, all dashing spies and plots and hopeless romance. Glancing up, she saw Arthur had settled in all right, though his reading “Sunset Over the Red Sage” had been pushed aside by Dido, as had happened so many times when he’d been left with hours and hours of lying there in his pajamas reading at Las Hermanas. She’d grown up big, predicted by those huge paws she’d had as a tiny kitten, so she covered most of his chest now. But whenever she saw him reading while lying down, which he usually still did from force of habit, she liked to reclaim her spot, sprawling out over him and purring happily.

He must have fallen asleep, because his eyes were shut. At least he’d taken off his boots before lying down, so that was fine. Shaking her head, she carefully plucked the book from where he’d laid it against his stomach, reaching out to scratch Dido on the nape of the neck in thanks. She smoothed his rumpled hair off his forehead, and leaned down to kiss him lightly on the cheek. “‘Night, honey.”

~~~~~~~~~~

Up and at it early, he quickly scented out that Mattie needed some attention, left sighing at the mess. Leaving Bea and Sadie sleeping, he tended to it, digging through their things to find a clean diaper and washrags, given they’d been too tired to fully unpack last night.

“I do love you, boy,” he told his son, “but you are impressively full of shit.” Bea hadn’t been nearly so creative in wriggling out of her diaper either. “Where the hell you making all of it from, I ask you? Ain’t like your diet’s changed.” 

Mattie gave him an almost apologetic smile as Arthur fastened the pins in the clean diaper, looking up at him with those hazel eyes so like Sadie’s, and saying “Da?”

“You’re real lucky you’re cute,” he said dryly, but couldn’t resist picking him up, holding him tight, breathing in the--now blessedly shit-free--soap-and-baby scent of him. Not putting a clean gown on him just yet, walking out onto the porch, letting both of them get some morning sunlight and fresh air. Peaceful still, barely just dawn, a few people out and about, moving with that languid, sleepy air of folks working their way to wakefulness. 

He sat there on one of the chairs on the porch, letting Mattie drowse against his chest, giving him a gentle pat on the back, talking lowly to him. Intending to get him to sleep and then go put him back to bed for it, but wanting to enjoy the spring morning up here for a few minutes. He’d missed so much with Isaac that all these little morning moments with Bea, and now with Mattie, felt like a gift. “Got some squirrels in them trees there. And you hear that? Got a bluejay calling. Looks like some mint growing there too. Your Grandpa Hosea taught me a lot about the wilds, and your momma and your Uncle Charles too. You just met him last night, sure, but he’s a good man. One of the finest I know. You’re pretty little for all of it yet, but maybe your sister and me should go for a walk later. No point either of you two getting to be as old and dumb as I was about all of it.”

Dozing off himself a bit, he snapped awake at the sound of a footfall, a creak of the wood as someone stepped up onto that porch, reaching instinctively for a gun that wasn’t there, because both his and Sadie’s gunbelts were inside and hung up on a hook far too high for Bea to reach. Mattie jostled awake too, and he automatically started shushing and comforting the boy, anticipating the alarm at Arthur’s startled lurch. But he settled quickly, and Arthur glanced up from him at the man who’d come to call. 

Given he was there on the porch of this cabin in bare feet, suspenders down around his hips, wearing an untucked and water-splashed shirt only mostly buttoned, hair still a sleep tousled mess, and clutching a baby in nothing but a cloth diaper, he wasn’t exactly what he’d call fit for receiving company. But then, the man himself had once joked dryly about lacking the grandeur of a conventional king.

“Hello, sir,” he said to Rains Fall.

Rains Fall’s dark gaze flicked to Arthur, obviously taking him in, seeing the differences from the man who’d bid him farewell in his lodge four and a half years ago now. Arthur had the thought for a moment of a sharp-eyed old eagle. Then he smiled a little, gesturing to Mattie, who’d turned his head to glance curiously at the new arrival. “I remember those years. Treasure them. They go by too swiftly.” 

Seeing the way the older man’s eyes lingered on Mattie, knowing that hunger all too well, remembering volunteering to hold Jack to give Abigail a break, he offered, “You want to hold him? He’s a bit wary of strangers, but he’ll warm up to folk soon enough.”

“Then I’ll wait for him to be interested in it,” Rains Fall replied, folding his hands behind his back in an almost formal-looking gesture. “Patience is something adults come into. I came to see how you were settling in.”

“Fine, thanks.” A lot of questions boiled up within him, though. So many things he couldn’t write in letters, and new ones from what Charles had said yesterday. 

He saw the same hesitancy in Rains Fall too for a moment, then the chief asked, “Would you ride with me awhile, Arthur?”

That seemed right. It was on that ride to Owl Butte that it felt like they’d truly talked, to the point he found himself pouring out thoughts and feelings he’d never dared breathe to anyone in years, if ever. “Sure.” He hefted Mattie back up into the crook of his arm. “Let me get this one settled first and get dressed.” 

It took barely five minutes to get Mattie settled again, and scribble a note for Sadie letting her know where he’d gone, brushing a kiss across her forehead. He’d let her sleep while she could. Chances were Bea would wake her up soon enough. Pulling on his socks and boots, tucking in his shirt and pulling up his suspenders and tying on a kerchief, grabbing his hat and gunbelt, he went quietly out the door.

Getting Buell saddled was quick work also, and Rains Fall was there with that same blue roan Nokota he’d ridden those years ago, both to Owl Butte and into Beaver Hollow in a desperate attempt to stop Eagle Flies. He jumped into the saddle with the lithe grace of a much younger man, obviously someone who’d lived his life largely on horseback from his childhood.

Another man approached as Rains Fall reached for the reins. “Is it time yet, Paytah?” Rains Fall asked him, and now Arthur recognized the young man who’d ridden beside Eagle Flies, who’d married the woman Charles had hoped would choose him.

“Not yet, but soon,” he replied, giving Rains Fall a slight smile, though Arthur spotted the pucker of worry in his brows. “Though Many Winters swears she’s carrying twins. Coyote Runs is still causing trouble, though. Two Crows said he was talking in the bachelor lodge last night about forming a raiding party.”

“Your thought on how best to handle this?” Rains Fall asked, inclining his head towards Paytah slightly.

Paytah hesitated, then nodded. “It’s best you stand aside, because he’ll assume you’ll take Bright Waters’ side. I’ll ask him to go hunting with me. There’s anger in his heart. I’ll listen.”

“Good,” Rains Fall said, the warmth of pride in his voice. It was about that point, in that quiet exchange, that Arthur understood he was looking at the next chief of the Wapiti. Rains Fall had remarried last year, and Stands Fast was a widow with a daughter, and from his letters and Charles’, he cherished his stepdaughter, Bright Waters. The woman whose cabin he and Sadie were now staying in, and the fact that she expected to not need it all summer said plenty about her opinion on a swift reconciliation with her cheating husband. 

Rains Fall had never replaced Eagle Flies, not as a son, not in his heart. But a king needed an heir, and obviously Paytah had proven himself capable to wear that mantle. He must have started on building that trust and that skill when he led the escape to Canada with the bulk of the Wapiti. 

Paytah looked his way, lifting a hand in greeting. “Good to see you again, and see you well.”

“Likewise,” he said, giving him a nod of acknowledgment, and a small respectful salute, touching his fingers to the brim of his hat. Hitching up into Buell’s saddle, he followed Rains Fall’s lead, heading west, away from the lakeshore.

“I saw you still wear that talisman, even now,” Rains Fall said a few minutes later. 

He couldn’t help but reflexively touch it, still in its place on his belt. “That, old Buell here, and the clothes on my back that night, are about the only things I brought with me from that life.” He urged Buell on a bit, to close the gap between himself and the chief. “You was right that things didn’t mean much. But this, it meant a lot to me. That you’d see...something in me worth that respect. Didn’t see myself as a man worth anyone’s time.”

“I saw that in you,” he answered. 

He felt himself blushing at that, though perceptive as Rains Fall obviously was, it shouldn’t be any surprise that the man had seen right through him. “How is it here? Charles told Sadie and me some of it last night.”

“Is that honestly what you’re asking?”

He smiled wryly, acknowledging he’d been caught out. “There’s this nun you should meet, down in Mexico. You’d get along real fine, the two of you, cause you both have my number.” He gestured back towards the village. “It seems like a lot of things ain’t any better than they was back to Grizzly Ridge. Is there anything I can do, while I’m here?”

“This is the way of things. There are hardships, yes, but the hardest blows come to our spirits.” He sighed. “I come from a proud people, Arthur Griffith. I remember how it was when I was a boy, and a young warrior. We moved with the buffalo, no boundaries, no laws but the ones of our own making. Fought to protect our own, fought for honor, for survival. Sometimes it was pride as much as honor, true. But it was our life, our tribe. A freedom that’s gone like the last of the sunlight.”

“This world don’t find that way of life tolerable. Progress slows for nobody, and you gotta conform to its shape, or be stamped out.” Rains Fall looked at him. “Outlaws rode wild over borders, and lived by our own codes. Fought other gangs. We fought for greed and blood by the end, not freedom like Dutch claimed, but we was trying to run from civilization, just the same. And they hunted us down as enemies of their almighty god of progress. Ain’t saying we was innocent folk, not like you Wapiti, but I do understand.” Some nights he still dreamed of riding, wild and free as they’d been, beholden to nothing but their own allegiances and supposed ideals.

“Hehakaton,” Rains Fall said, a tinge of anger and sorrow in his voice. 

“Pardon?”

“They took even our name from us. My people are the Hehakaton. ‘Wapiti’ is a word they got from a tribe further east telling white men about us. Our enemies. They wrote it down in their books, and that’s become our name on every treaty I ever signed, every white man’s mention of us. It’s on the sign for our reserve. I told myself that peace mattered most, but a name still matters. A name carries power.” He looked at Arthur. “You understand that. You changed your name, and in doing so, you gave yourself a new life. But ‘Griffith’ was no name given to you by your foes.”

“No. It was given to me by my wife,” he answered. Impulsively as anything, but he couldn’t deny there had been a certain magic in it, a doorway opened for him to become somebody new, somebody better. “It was Sadie’s name to give, from before her first marriage. Lending me some of her respectability, I suppose. It seems to have taken root.”

“Or it just allowed you the freedom to become the good man you obviously wished to be. She gave you that name in honor, and in hope. We all have our white names now, given to us by our enemies. Names given not in honor, but contempt. There’s no power in them. They force us into a life--the white way. He nodded towards the west, gesturing that way with a quick, emphatic flip of his hand. “About an hour west of the boundary of this reserve, I hear that a rancher has a few dozen bison. The last ones in this land. A good man, trying to keep them from perishing entirely. We were people of the bison, _wakan_ , a sacred relationship. They seemed endless as the skies and the stars, once, and so did our ways. And now those few bison and we few Hehakaton both live in the spaces we’ve been penned in, live the lives we must to have any future. When we surrendered to the Canadians, they sent us here, to this lakeshore. We aren’t people of lakes and forests, but this was where they’d already placed our eastern cousins, the Keyakaton. They’d been here nearly forty years, where they fled the soldiers during your big war, after they fought to try to hold their lands. I was a young man then, and we didn’t see that fifteen years later, it would be our turn to fight soldiers and settlers, and lose all that we held dear, piece by piece. And now I do see. I look at the Keyakaton and see what forty years here will do to us. We’ll take on the ways we must, but the cost is hard to bear.”

The guilt twisted within him, like a fishhook caught in his heart. “What can I do?”

Rains Fall sighed, dropping the reins. “As you said, there’s no slowing their plan. And you have much to risk by calling too much attention to yourself by fighting it. I tell you this because I saw four years ago that you’re someone who can see, and listen, and perhaps tell these things where my people can’t. Teach your own children that we’re more than savages. We weren’t a people of writing. We were-- _are_ \--a people of stories. So listen, and see, and remember.” 

The words carried solemn weight, almost a sacred charge, every bit as much as Calderón talking about faith and belief and hope. He nodded, taking them to heart. “I will. But there must be something Sadie and me can do to help things even a little, while we’re here. Things like if we go hunting, folk will give us less grief. Is there someone we should bring that to?”

“Many Winters,” he answered. “Mr. Frazier had her formally appointed as our quartermaster to ease the way, it seems, but she’ll see that everyone gets their fair share.”

“All right. What else you lacking?”

Rains Fall nodded. “Medicine. We have a doctor who comes by perhaps every few months, by government order, but he brings only a few supplies, and we have none.”

After the first flash of irritation that of course they had no doctor to help them, or care, an idea started brewing in his head. “What medical problems you got?”

“Broken bones, cuts, childbirth. Winter fevers.” He looked at Arthur, gesturing towards his chest. “Tuberculosis. Though if nothing else, isolating us means we don’t have to worry about the likes of smallpox.”

“How bad’s your TB patient?”

“Dead now,” Rains Falls answered with a sort of dignified sorrow. “But I expect there will be others. We’ve seen and heard where there’s one, there will be others.”

“I know a doctor. The governor of Nuevo Paraiso shut down his clinic at the convent where he treated me. They’re isolating all the TB patients from both Nuevo Paraiso and Michitlan in some seaside sanitorium under government control.” Arthur shook his head. “Locking them up to die, I don’t doubt. Felipe, uh, kinda pissed off the government with his protest, so he might be happy to leave Mexico. I could write him, see if he’d perhaps be willing to come north. He’s a good man, a good doctor.” The urge was right there: _let me do what I can_.

Rains Fall looked at him, another of those quiet smiles breaking across his face. “So you’ve become a man with a cause of helping others, I see.”

“Whether we go back and forth on Eagle Flies and me saving each other’s lives, you took me in that day, when Sadie knew you was the only friendly faces she could find.”

“You’d saved our village with those vaccines you and Captain Monroe took from the soldiers. You helped bring back our sacred artifacts. You were known to us as a friend, and her too. She had helped bring us game, along with Charles. You and Sadie both fought to try to keep our young men from being slaughtered by Mr. Van Der Linde’s plans.” 

“Still. You, of all people, knew I was a hunted man. But you gave me and Sadie shelter. Risked them soldiers coming down even harder on all your people. I’d have died that day otherwise. So the life I have, my children’s lives, I owe to you.” It seemed no more than the truth. If he owed his survival, and the happiness he had now, to anyone, it was to Sadie, Rains Fall, and Felipe. The one who’d come back for him and done so much for him since, the one who’d sheltered him, and the one who’d healed him. “I got my faults for certain, but I own my debts. So what I can do while I‘m here, you tell me.”

He saw the ones that could still likely never be paid, so many years of blood and dishonor, and all he could try to do was bring what goodness he could to others to try to bring a sort of balance, even if not a true healing. For the rest of his life, he’d carry the weight of knowledge that his life wasn’t entirely his own. He owed too much in trying to repay those sins where he could. That didn’t mean it wasn’t a good life all the same, and the sweetness of being a husband and father was still something warm and bright. The sense that he had those things undeservedly still came, but rarely. He’d come to terms with his life, that was all, and made peace with who he was and what was owed both to repayment and to his present and future, and how best to keep that all in a careful balance. Sadie hadn’t been wrong to say that if he ran off without restraint, got himself killed foolishly throwing himself at some kind of redemption, it did no good either.

As for debts--the one Sadie told him about sat heavily too. At least Chip Cooper wouldn’t send a collections man after them. His children wouldn’t have to watch as some devil from their nightmares tried to threaten and beat their father. Though he knew Sadie wouldn’t stand by either. That was no poor reflection on Edith Downes, gentle soul as she’d been, unjustly thrown to the lions. Just that wasn’t Sadie’s way. She’d fight, to the very end.

But there was no fighting this. Jake had signed those bills, hadn’t told Sadie, and now they had to figure out how to handle that shock. Two hundred dollars. God, he’d thrown two hundred dollars to the wind at a poker table in Nebraska once, cocky young bastard that he’d been, flush with cash and pride after a bank robbery. Probably spent that much on stupid things other times too. Feast or famine, that outlaw life, and it taught them to live it up while the money was there, and not think about tomorrow and how to handle it. There would always be another train, another bank, another stagecoach, once they got poor enough to need it.

Two hundred dollars. Nearly everything they had left saved. No year-round work in sight, the kids too young to go back to the risk of bounty hunting, and no money for land without taking out a bank loan, and if they’d been vehement before about avoiding that, this debt of Jake’s was going to make both of them damn near intrasigent about the notion. 

Being honest, he had no idea what the hell they were going to do. But he wouldn’t let that intrude just now. Rains Fall’s problems were bigger than one man’s money woes, and he suspected they hadn’t ridden out just for the hell of it. “What you wanted us out this way for?” he asked, but with politeness.

“I’m old, yes, but not so old as to be in my cabin helpless. It does me good to sit on my horse and ride. Come to know this land and its changes. Collect my thoughts of a morning.” He gestured behind them, to the still-rising sun at their backs. “Besides, it does me good to see a changed man before me.”

He thought he understood. Eagle Flies hadn’t lived to see that chance, that change. He’d died in Rains Fall’s lodge that autumn evening, young and angry and deceived. “I told you once, on that ride when we spoke of your son, that I had a son I failed, and you asked me. But I didn’t know to ask then, and I didn’t ask later when I could. Your older son. Your first wife. I never asked their names.”

Rains Fall’s brows knit, and a look of pain crossed his features. Arthur had the feeling that like Isaac and Eliza before this man had asked him, they were names that hadn’t been spoken aloud in years. Then he spoke two names, first obviously in Wapiti--Hehakaton. “My wife was called Shooting Star. She was born the night of one. It was considered a sign. Our first boy was Thunder In His Heart.” He looked at Arthur directly, dark gaze level and direct. “Thank you for asking me. Stands Fast is a good woman, a kind one, but they’ve been gone so long, and some things...”

Some things were hard for a leader, expected to be so much more than a man. “Like you said. Sometimes we need other folk to help us remember. But once you do, it gets easier in the telling, and in the remembering.” He’d first pulled out that memory only with difficulty after nine years, determined to never speak of the pain and guilt and shame again, and Hosea, Dutch, and Susan respected had that silence. Bessie had too, until her death. But after he’d told Rains Fall, he’d been able to tell some to Calderón a few months later, say the whole thing to Sadie that next spring, and then tell Karen about them too eventually. He could say their names now without that heavy, awful feeling of cutting himself open to bleed. The loss was there yet, but the overwhelming sorrow had lightened. “And I expect Stands Fast wouldn’t mind. She’s a widow. She’s taken her own pain. Maybe she needs to say a thing or two.” She was his wife. She knew he was only a man at the end of the day.

Now Rains Fall actually did laugh, lighting up his face, and Arthur could see some of the dashing young warrior he’d been, alongside the gravely dignified chief. Probably been as brave and reckless as Eagle Flies. “So you’ve gained wisdom too. Good.” He pointed north. “Let’s continue our ride, shall we?”

He nodded at that, and it made for a peaceful hour or two, riding some of the reserve. It made for wild and beautiful country, lakeshore and tall trees and rolling grassy hills. A piece of the untamed west that he’d thought was the gang’s dream. A place that could be easy to love, but he didn’t have the tribe’s deep attachment to lands and a way of life they’d so loved already. 

He’d brought his bow, as had the old chief, since it had seemed more appropriate to hunt that way while they were here. Sighting a herd of antelope, Rains Fall took down one with an effortless clean shot from horseback that Arthur could only envy, though he managed one of his own, as much by luck as anything. “Charles had said you’re a fine shot,” he said, giving a clear compliment where Arthur couldn’t help but blush.

“Should have seen me before Charles taught me,” he admitted. “I wasn’t much of a hunter. Of anything but people, anyhow.” 

Tying the game down to the horse’s backs, they headed back towards the village, and he couldn’t help but smile at it, eager as ever to get back to Sadie and the kids.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
How was it that it went again? “Sing, oh Muse” or the like? “Write, oh Fella” seems to be my charge here, and so write I shall. Whatever it is these folk would like written down so it ain’t lost. They already had so much taken from them, and more still to go.

But spirits seem good all the same. Guess anything is an improvement over them barren rocks they was living in before at Grizzly Ridge. I’ll do what I can for them. Charles seems well, though melancholy from his loneliness clings to him hard. There’s a feeling I know. 

Rains Fall is still much the same. Wise and dignified, carrying so many burdens. A man who can’t lead his people where he wishes he could, but must watch them walking forward into some future that got handed to them at gunpoint. He makes the best of it but I can see he worries for them, even so. 

It must be a fearful thing to carry the weight of your people’s future, not only a family. A family is about all I can handle and even there I fear I’m doing poor little at in the end compared to what dreams I had three years back. Two hundred bucks in unexpected debt is a real bad problem, and I can’t even get mad and damn Jake Adler for it. ~~Not to Sadie’s face anyhow.~~ Sadie loved him, and I expect he meant well. I suppose I can’t complain about being gifted the folly of another man’s poor choices given so many of my own shall go unanswered. Besides, it only put a shorter fuse on something already there. It’s one thing to go honest and mean it but I gotta find some way to make ends meet that don’t ask too many questions of me, but avoids going back to robbery and ruthlessness.

( **Sketch of Minnewakan Village** , captioned “MINNEWAKAN. Home for the summer.”)

( **Sketch of Rains Fall and Stands Fast out for a ride together** , captioned “RF + SF. I expect she’s an interesting woman.”)  
( **Sketch of Sadie, Karen, and Charles sitting together talking** , captioned “Somehow I wonder at the wisdom of getting these two together again. Them two ran things just fine with us senior guns all gone, and I know Karen and Sadie are enough to outwit me already.”

( **Various sketches of plants and animals of the area** )

**Letter to Felipe from Arthur**

Felipe,  
Hope all is well with you, though perhaps saying that comes across a bit trite. I know it’s been tough months since Governor Allende’s edict came down about the TB ward. I know you and Mother Calderón fought like hell for it all the same. 

I ain’t sure about what will happen with Sadie and me, but you know as well as I do that we was hesitant about whether we would return at the end of this summer anyway. Pedro and Juanita already called it quits and headed south. I think they may have been the wise ones. Nuevo Paraiso is changing, and not for the better. It’s not Del Lobos that Sadie and me can fight with gunslinging and bounty hunting. This comes with the force of Allende’s law behind it, and that’s gonna crush anyone in its way like a freight train. 

If you was to be looking for a new adventure rather than, as you put it, ‘being put out to pasture treating elderly rancheros for their gout and then their sons for the clap besides’, the tribal reserve up here is your sort of cause. They’re people the most in need of kindness and doctoring, cause they’re folk the world don’t look upon kindly. I said I would ask if you might be interested.

Take care of yourself, old friend. We both know you work too hard all the same.  
Arthur


	35. Minnewakan: Further Questions of Faith and Wisdom I

“So run this by me again.” Sadie muttered it in an undertone as she glanced over at Red Shawl, trying to wave and sway her hands in rhythm with her and the other women on their team--Bright Waters and Stand Fast’s sister, Laughing Woman. Karen, over on the other side with Stands Fast, Wears Great Medicine, and Dances for the Elk looked equally awkward as Sadie, but Wears Great Medicine obviously was talking her through the game too.

“Stands Fast and Dances for the Elk are hiding the bones in their hands,” Red Shawl explained patiently, above the chanting and the sound of the men’s drumming. “Laughing Woman is guessing which hand the two unmarked bones are in on each of them. If she’s right on any, we win the bones, and once we have them both, they start hiding and we start guessing.”

“And if she guesses wrong on one or both, we lose one of our sticks, yeah?” She nodded towards the fan of five sticks laying in the grass by Laughing Woman’s knee.

“Yes. And the game goes until one team has all the sticks.” She grinned at Sadie. “Very simple rules, but the trick is all in the rest. The singing, the chanting, the clapping, the drumming, and when you’re a hider, you’re trying with your face and your gestures to make the other side guess wrong.” 

“Sure, I just don’t wanna make a fool of myself when you gals was kind enough to let me play.” She shook her head. Maybe Arthur would be a better one for this game. He’d played enough roles over the years, and learned from a true quicksilver con man in Hosea. But he was off right now with Charles and some of the other men doing who knew what, and the women were blowing off steam with some games.

“ _Ina_ ,” she heard a child’s chirp behind her, and Two Hawks tried to shove onto his mother’s lap. “Bored. Tell me a story!” She’d last seen the boy as a newborn back at Grizzly Ridge, but he’d grown into a sturdy little boy, four and a half now, with an untidy mop of dark brown waves and his mother’s luminous dark eyes. The boy Red Shawl had told her now that they’d given a white name too--Arthur Weathers--for the man who she insisted had helped save them back in 1899. Just another kindness he’d probably try to disavow, even now, especially since as she understood it, Snow Goose had been one of Strauss’ debtors. 

It was Wears Great Medicine who shook her head, and carefully nudged Two Hawks away from Red Shawl. “Your _ina_ is busy right now,” she told him with a smile, looking up into his face. “If you’re bored, go and play with the other children.” She gave him a gentle push between his shoulders back towards the circle of the other kids, including Bea, Danny, and Mattie, and Two Hawks scurried back. Bea gave him a delighted wave.

“Thanks,” Red Shawl told her, with an answering smile, turning back to the game.

It went back and forth for a while, Sadie better getting the hang of it but still feeling a bit of a fool, until finally Stands Fast’s team won. She gave an apologetic shrug, stretching out her legs, but in no hurry to get up from the grassy patch beside the commissary where they’d gathered. A fine spring day, sun bright and warm, everything seeming a bit better for it. Even the splintery pine boards of the buildings of Minnewakan village, weathered somewhat already by sun and rain and snow, seemed a bit less tired on a day like this. “Guess I’m more suited to poker. Maybe five-finger fillet.”

“What about horse races?” Wears Great Medicine said with an impish smile. “I love a good horse race. Love betting on one too.” Bright Waters laughed at that, all of them women coming to sit in the circle. Sadie took advantage of her trousers to sit with her legs drawn up to her chest for a bit, arms resting on her knees. 

“We should likely be doing something,” Red Shawl said with a nervous glance towards the village.

Stands Fast clucked her tongue at that. “It’s no shame in a woman spending time with her friends without work in her hands,” she told Red Shawl, voice suddenly gone gentle, dark eyes soft with compassion. “You’re nobody’s servant here like you was among the Arahka, _máške_. You won’t be beaten. ” Sadie had the feeling that she spoke English for Sadie and Karen’s benefit, not Red Shawl’s.

Red Shawl bit her lip, breathing in a deep breath, shoulders rolling back, and then nodding. “That was all I knew. And it’s been six years since I left them. What you say, my mind knows it. But my heart sometimes don’t.”

A few low murmurs of understanding came from the other women at that. Laughing Woman shook her head, looking at her sister, a tired and sad look that looked out of place on that round face lined with laughter, as her name proclaimed. “Lots of things our minds know, but our hearts don’t. I think you young ones are better off. You were born after the Hehakaton as a tribe was already broken. There’s less for you to remember, and mourn.”

“We feel it all the same,” Wears Great Medicine said. “We’re here in this place. The men feel it. Doing stupid things like talking raids. Didn’t they learn? Some of them didn’t come back the last time they rode to war. Our chief’s son died. Raid the soldiers, we all suffer. There’s no honor in it.”

Bright Waters gave a derisive snort, gesturing back towards the bachelor bunks. “You can say it, Wears Great Medicine. I know that Coyote Runs leads that pack of fools. Drunk and stupid, I’m sure. And him blaming me for all of it.”

“Daughter,” Stands Fast said with a sigh, hand to her forehead as if she had a sudden headache, eyes squeezing shut.

“ _Ina_ , stop asking, I won’t take him back,” Bright Waters answered, her onyx-dark eyes flashing fire. “Paints the Lodge is welcome to him, if she wants. If I marry again, it’ll be to a good man like my father, or Rains Fall.” 

Stands Fast spoke up, her words careful, and with a solemn edge. “It’s true. More young men are turning fool. But what do they have for a way, for their pride, their honor? Everything that a man could do to prove himself is gone. War. Horse raids. Hunting the bison. They can’t fight to protect us from the government. Not with guns and bows. They’re angry and they’re lost. Paytah and the others do what they can, I know, but there’s nothing to fill that hollowness in the tribe. Nothing except the ways they want us force us to follow. Owning the land. Farming it. Becoming like them. Forgetting any wisdom we had. And so we women suffer for it too.” 

Sadie thought it was best to be wise enough to keep her mouth shut about farming, given she and Arthur still had ambitions in the direction of farming. But she did have to say one thing, in all honesty. “If you become like them, it’s no good how white folk see women. The laws say a father or a husband owns us. Like a horse. Can do pretty well whatever he wants with you and your kids.” She’d seen things were different here. Men listened to the women, respected their words. They still eyed her pants dubiously, but warrior women weren’t entirely unknown, and she was more of a curiosity to them than an “affront to womanhood”, which had been the opinion of some random dumbass in Winnipeg. She looked at the other women, glancing around the circle. “I’m lucky. I’ve had two men now that see me with respect. But trusting a man that much, when he has that sort of power over you if he wants it--no easy thing.”

Dances for the Elk looked thoughtful at that. She was the youngest, just past eighteen if Sadie judged correctly, and shy and gentle besides. Obviously trying to glean some wisdom from these other women, wanting so much to be more grown up than she really was. Probably would have to grow up too fast anyway in this place and this situation. 

“Better to not marry, you ask me,” Karen said dryly. “I got my boy, that’s enough. Most men, they’re useful for one thing, and they ain’t even that good at it.”

“I don’t know,” Laughing Woman said mischievously, a smile tugging at her mouth. “Some of them are pretty good.” Red Shawl laughed, and even Stands Fast chuckled politely with a twinkle in her eye, which said plenty. Sadie had seen the fondness between her and Rains Fall, and apparently there was some fire to it too. Good for them.

She couldn’t help but laugh appreciatively at that, talk both serious and silly. It felt good sitting here among other women, like it had been back in camp. She’d never really had that before then. Once she was growing out of girlhood, some friends--like Laura--moved away, and others married and had babies and that life and their farms took on the highest priority, living hardscrabble as they were. They almost never got together in a group like this. Then up in Ambarino it had been her and Jake, and few neighbors besides, and them distant ones, and almost no women. Sitting with numerous other women and just talking was a pleasure she hadn’t anticipated. 

She had to think, as she glanced over at the kids playing like a pile of puppies, giggling and laughing, that maybe it wasn’t only the Hehakaton men who struggled. She’d lived that way, nomadic, free, with that sense of community, for half a year, and those were the deeply marred and rotten last days. But she’d seen there could be an allure to that way, that notion, that sense of freedom and telling society and all its strictures to go to hell. Arthur had lived that life for years and years, as had Karen. They’d gotten by, true, and while he’d gone honest as the day was long, things hadn’t settled yet into a life and its rhythms that supported rather than entangled. But at least they could go anywhere, and try anything. They weren’t tied down like the tribe by so many laws and restrictions and expectations. 

“Speaking of having a fine time with a fella,” Karen drawled, smirking over at Sadie, “you should probably be getting ready to head out. Just saw Arthur heading for your cabin, and he looks real eager.”

“We got married three years ago today,” she explained hastily to the others, “and it was just my birthday, so Karen agreed to watch Mattie and Bea overnight and Arthur and me are heading into Banner for a bit. We’ll be back sometime tonight,” she said, looking around the group, hearing the knowing laughs and trying hard to avoid blushing even more, and probably failing to judge from the increased heat in her face, and cursing her fair skin. “Uh, does anyone need anything else while we’re in town? We’re picking up the regular supplies, of course.”

“If they actually get delivered,” Wears Great Medicine said with an angry twist to her mouth. “The government don’t want us to hunt, and then half the time the food they promise is late, or terrible, or never.” 

“If some fool’s trying to hold your rations, trust me, I’m gonna twist his ear about it. Happy to pick up other stuff for you gals while I’m there.” She still remembered picking things up for them in Valentine those years ago, medicine and ammunition that they couldn’t easily buy for themselves, and the memory had stuck with her. 

She busied herself scribbling down the small requests--sewing needles, salt, a few yards of calico, some candy for the children, rifle ammunition. Arthur would be likewise checking with the men, from what he said this morning. Things she could pick up easily for the women, rather than them having to request a pass from Frank Frazier to go do their shopping, and it was unfair as hell, but at least she could do her part. She couldn’t fix everything, but she could try to make it easier for them so long as she was here. 

She couldn’t deny Karen called it rightly--she was eager. Quickly as they’d leaped from their wedding to having children, and finding Karen in there too, there had been so little space where it had been only them and the luxury of time and privacy. Six weeks until Karen had come into their lives, and nine months almost exactly before Bea’s arrival, compared to those two years and more that she and Jake had shared. She hadn’t fully realized the sweetness of it until those days were gone.

Not that things were sour between them in bed by any means. But it had necessarily changed. A crowded house with Karen listening, two small kids prone to needing things in the night, and when they were little, sleeping in the same room in a crib besides. They’d gotten used to their encounters, at least those in bed, usually being somewhat brisk and to the point, keeping as quiet as they could, usually not removing more clothes than necessary. This last week here in Minnewakan, they’d only dared it once, and conscious of the kids sleeping, it had been hushed, furtive, in the dark, beneath the blankets, seeing Arthur in the dim moonlight biting his lip rather than make a sound. She’d leaned down and kissed him instead, stoppering up any noise in a far better way.

They managed all the same. Wherever they could steal a moment could turn into a furious and fast interlude between them, and there were times back home those weekly baths at the hotel ran a bit long. Sometimes when they were out hunting or the like, they’d thrown down a blanket and taken an extra hour or so, reveling in sunlight and fresh air on bare skin, having some time to touch and dawdle. But the pull was always there, the reminder of other responsibilities, that cut their idyll to a minimum, and sometimes that ground was damn hard besides.

Karen had offered to watch the kids for a night more than once, and they’d taken her up on it twice. But given May 1st had come while they were still working at MacFarlane's both times, they'd had to delay taking anniversary plans until they got back to Mexico. So this would be something special, it truly being their wedding anniversary. It felt like things were coming together in other ways too. With them all living in the same house, it had felt strange and stupid to pay for a hotel room in Chuparosa with their own bed within walking distance that first year. They’d gone to Escalera last June, and that had been good for a few hours, but the worry about being away from home if something happened marred it, as did the strange mood rising in town with some of Allende’s changes. They’d waited till morning only in the interest of not risking Del Lobos in the desert at night, and ridden back. They might have cut that physical cord between her and her babies both times she’d given birth, and Arthur had never had that, but the bond was there all the same, strong as anything, and they both could feel the tug of it.

So they wouldn’t stay in Banner tonight. Especially with the money problems, no reason to get a hotel anyway. They’d come back and spend the night in their cabin, all alone but with the kids nearby. The thought of Arthur and a comfortable bed and a whole night together, imagining the look of him stretched out on that bed and lit by lantern light, the feel of his skin against hers, had her already feeling restless and impatient. 

Jolting herself back to reality with effort, she finished scribbling Stands Fast’s request for some liniment for her joints, given she couldn’t easily find the right herbs for it on the reserve. “All right, got it.”

“Get your shopping done first,” Laughing Woman advised with a knowing chuckle.

She sighed, giving them a wave farewell, and headed to the kids, hugging Bea and Mattie. “Now remember,” she told Bea, “you’re staying with Aunt Karen and Uncle Charles and Danny tonight.”

“You and Daddy gone?” she asked, face scrunching up in anxiety.

“No, baby,” she reached out and smoothed her daughter’s hair, “we’re gonna be in our cabin.” Thankfully she didn’t need to explain to a two-year-old how that all worked, and why, and Mattie was far too young even for that explanation. Picking Mattie up, she held him tight. “All right, buster, get you fed.”

He wasn’t nursing much now, only once or twice a day, and sleeping through the night besides. Things would be much easier now compared to when that happened with Bea and she’d rolled right from nursing Bea into nursing a newborn Mattie barely two weeks later. He was taking a little longer at it, but that was fine, everyone reassured her things happened at their own pace, and he was eating food more and more. She could already feel the aching pressure in her breasts looking for release, and better to handle it before she and Arthur left, for both her sake and their son’s. “We’ll be back in a few,” she called to the women, knowing they’d understand, given most of them had young kids, or had been through this themselves in the past.

Back in the cabin, unfastening her blouse and breastband, and unbuttoning the placket of her camisole enough to accomplish necessary business, she let Mattie set to work there, feeling some of the tension drain from her by it, cuddled there with his soft warm skin against hers, his mouth working greedily away.

The knock came and she called, “Yeah?”, ready to reach for a shawl if need be. Tribal women didn’t seem to have that taboo. She’d seen Red Shawl open her blouse and nurse her daughter, Standing Horse, nonchalantly at the women’s circle, and figured that out. Maybe she ought to just do it too, but something in her hesitated, all the lifelong notions of shame and decency so hard to overcome. Hell, in the cities, it wasn’t considered proper for a visibly pregnant woman to be out in public in certain genteel circles. For now, when it came to the Hehakaton, some of her ways weren’t theirs, and some of theirs weren’t hers, and maybe that was all right, because they had that respect between them all the same. 

“It’s me,” Arthur called, opening the door. No need to cover up around him, regardless, as she shifted Mattie to her other breast. Hungry today, apparently. Heading for the trunk at the foot of the bed, Arthur gave a bit of a wry smile, nodding to Mattie. “Lucky fella,” he quipped.

She rolled her eyes, grabbing a sock she’d left on the table for darning, balling it up in her fist, and throwing it at him. “Good things come to those who wait.”

She missed it too, though--his hands, his mouth, on her breasts, having them be something sensual again rather than what amounted to a chow call for their children. That was one of the things they’d had such a short time, and she’d loved it so much, the tenderness in him when he touched and kissed her there. But when she was pregnant, her breasts hurt, and with nursing, they still ached plus they were prone to start leaking. So that would have to wait until Mattie was weaned. 

“I know,” he answered, leaning down to kiss her on the cheek as he changed into a clean white shirt, and shrugged on a deep purple vest. “Well, what do you wanna do in Banner? Ain’t exactly high society from what I saw. Can’t take you to the theater or nothing.”

“Why, you wanna take me to the theater?” she teased him. “Watch a play, maybe some crazy vaudeville show? Those ones in St. Denis was really something.”

“They were,” he said. “What, you went?”

“Sure. Sometimes you gotta just go and do a thing, and me and J--” She cut herself off, before she said it. 

He nodded, once, comprehension dawning in his eyes. “You and Jake talked about going.” 

Caught out, there was no point in not admitting it. She looked away, focusing on Mattie instead. “He always wanted to see Shakespeare,” she admitted, voice barely above a whisper. “Wasn’t Shakespeare I saw, but…maybe he’d have liked that vaudeville, dramatic and strange as it all was. He liked to see the fineness in everything and everyone.” It was a curious pain to still have those reminders come out of nowhere and hurt her so much. 

He crouched in front of her sitting in that chair, reaching out, putting a hand over hers where it rested in her lap. “Well, I went with Mary, so I can’t exactly fault you for going in honor of Jake.” He sighed, awkwardly glancing away from her. “She asked me to go, I said yes, and there we was again, spinning them foolish dreams about running away like a pair of kids. Sucked back into that same damn tornado we called a romance.” She heard that, and it didn’t hit her with a pang of jealousy that he’d gone with Mary. That was before she’d loved him, and in truth, if anything, she felt more sorry for him and Mary than anything, because they’d made each other miserable, sounded like. They’d been fifteen years past the desperate kids they’d met as and still not escaped, either of them. He had, finally, and from what Mary-Beth had said, so had Mary. Obviously seeing she wasn’t going to make something of it, he looked up at her then, something earnest and soft in those green eyes of his. “I imagine it ain’t easy. Knowing it’s three years today, you and me. And you never got that long with him. You never got this.” He reached out, caressing Mattie’s blond hair with a gentle hand, giving their son a soft smile.

“I’m happy with you,” she reassured him, something tight in her throat that he could understand and be kind about it. “Don’t you ever think I ain’t.” But he’d hit the nail on the head all the same. It had been one thing to let go of Jake and move on, but these things came up that made him fade even more, bit by bit. Having children, and now having three years gone by since the wedding. She’d known, fate and God being generous, that Arthur would be the love and lover beside her for decades, rather than the short time she’d had with Jake, but to start to live that reality where this marriage took over the milestones of her first one still caught her in a strangely vulnerable place sometimes. But he was kind about it.

Finishing up, giving Mattie his proper burps and a kiss goodbye, she handed him to Arthur, telling him, “Go give him back to Karen, will you?” Hearing the door close behind him, she did up her buttons, and dug in the trunk herself. She decided to hell with it, this occasion called for a skirt. Pulling on the dark indigo skirt and a golden yellow vest herself--he might not be able to touch her breasts, but he could damn well admire them, and that vest did fine things to them--she quickly rebraided her hair, and headed out.

Hitting the trail back to Banner, they ended up taking a wagon to pick up supplies, and he asked her, “Getting restless and going shopping for a whole camp full of folk--feels familiar, don’t it?” He nodded towards her legs. “You in a skirt, even.” She could hear the teasing spark of humor in his voice. “I saw them handing you some letters. Do I need to watch the mail around you this time?” But she could hear the spark of humor in his voice.

She rolled her eyes, patting the rawhide pouch on the seat between them. “You was enjoying that letter of Pearson’s every bit as much as me, and don’t you pretend otherwise. Don’t think I didn’t see you nosing into things folk left out around camp.”

“Everyone was into everyone’s business all the damn time,” he said dryly. “Why you think I never left that journal of mine laying around?”

He hadn’t, true. But he hadn’t hidden his heart, not entirely. He hadn’t tucked away that picture of Mary Linton, not until it suddenly disappeared at Beaver Hollow. She’d thought it was gone days before, and then she hadn’t seen it to collect when she’d grabbed all his things in the half-burned wreckage of the camp.

“Well, you ever gonna let me get a peek at it?” she teased. She leaned into him, nudging his shoulder with hers. “I’m only joking.”

He looked thoughtful as he snapped the reins, urging Bob and Queenie on. Buell had seemed tired today, so they’d given him the rest. “You’ll read it someday, I imagine. You and the kids. When I’m gone.” 

She shook her head, feeling her heart suddenly in her throat. “Don’t you talk like that, Arthur. You being gone? It ain’t happening for a long time.”

“Sure, I hope not. But chances are, well...you’re a few years younger anyway, and the TB...” She could hear the awkwardness in his tone, the struggle to explain himself and somehow get out of that particular verbal trap he’d flung himself into by accident.

She kept her voice even only with an effort, that thick feeling welling up in her chest. “I already saw one husband buried. I don’t like to think about burying another. Not tomorrow, not next year, not thirty years from now.” She shook her head, gathering herself together only with effort. “Don’t make me dwell on the notion. Especially not today.”

She felt his arm slip around her waist for a moment in a brief, reassuring hug, then easing his grip, but keeping his arm around her. “I’m sorry. Being here, with the tribe and Charles, been making me think in the quiet moments about how it was then. All them days with death never too far off. Turns your thoughts dark, it seems.”

“Their life ain’t the best. Maybe ours ain’t either. But we’re alive. They’re alive. They still find their moments of happiness. So do we. And you ask me, that’s enough to keep going. Because if you’re alive there’s the chance it gets better.”

He let out a slow, long sigh. “Sure. But sometimes I envy you how simple it is to believe a thing and not doubt a bit about it. You’re unshakeable, Daisy. You stand there and say something and you ain’t gonna be moved on it, not for God or the Devil or nothing else.”

She reached out, lightly touching his hair behind his ear, just a momentary caress. Then she tweaked the brim of his hat playfully with a flip of her finger and thumb. “Oh, so ‘stubborn’, you mean?” 

He laughed, and it soothed her to hear the warmth and ease in it, knowing she’d shook him out of his mood. “I was putting it kindly, just about.” But she’d heard the quiet admiration in his tone, and the self-critical melancholy, all the same. Knew that he did apparently envy her, this man who’d been told what to do all his life by two fathers who’d used him, been expected to have no feelings or opinions of his own to challenge the boss, and who still sometimes seemed overwhelmed by making choices. He still sometimes backed down the moment she questioned him in an almighty hurry, sometimes obviously felt more comfortable when she decided a thing and gave him a path to follow. 

“You stood up when it mattered most,” she reminded him. “No matter how tired and sick you was, there never was a stronger man than you in that camp at the Hollow.”

To his credit, he didn’t counter that by insisting he should have done it sooner. So she let herself lean into him a bit more, and he kept his arm around her, the two of them just a married couple out for a drive to town together to do some shopping. Nothing but the serenity of the trees and the waving prairie grass and the barely visible lakeshore to their left as they headed south towards Banner, some kind of bird, maybe a grouse, startled into flight by the wagon with a flurry of rusty-colored wings and a squawk. She could have grabbed the repeater and bagged it easily, but instead she just watched it go, tracing the arc of its flight across the sky until it vanished into the distance. “Kind of nice to not worry about getting shot at for once while taking a drive, ain’t it?”

“Yeah. So this is how the normal folk do it, huh, Mrs. Griffith?”

She couldn’t help but smile. “Might be, Mr. Griffith.” She’d wanted peace and quiet up in Pinetree Gulch, and for a couple of years, she and Jake had it. Then she’d lived a life of blood and lead and ferocity for a time, and even in the past couple of years raising babies, the way Nuevo Paraiso got busy tearing itself apart was anything but restful. She could fight to defend herself and her own in a way she couldn’t before, but she missed that peace, all the same. Maybe she and Arthur could find that corner of the world to call their own, one full of serenity, again. If only they had more money. She bit back a sharp laugh at the realization she sounded like Dutch at that. God, didn’t it always trickle down to the money in the end, who had it and who didn’t? Her and Jake, Dutch and Hosea, her and Arthur. Plans and dreams beyond their means, and the pain of knowing that gap was so damn hard to bridge.

They arrived in Banner in the middle of the afternoon, her having taken the reins for a while, and she parked the wagon near the train station, given the tribal allotment would have arrived there. Arthur came around, offering her a hand to get down, but she gave him a slight smile, hitching herself down from the wagon with the push of one hand off the seat. She heard the chuckle behind her as she twitched her skirt back into place and headed into train station, mail pouch in hand. “Should have figured that, darlin’.”

Heading for the mail clerk, she opened up the pouch, seeing the letters there, including Arthur’s to Felipe. “Got some things to mail here.”

“Sure,” the clerk answered, his tone bright and cheerful. “You two down from the reserve, eh? I remember you saying that was why you came up all this way when you got here last week.”

“Yeah,” she replied as he sorted through the mail.

“So, fella--Mr.?”

“Nye. James Nye.”

“Arthur Griffith. Saw the notice board’s empty, but you ain’t heard of any jobs in the area as needs doing?” Arthur asked.

“Now how’s a fella like you know to ask a station clerk about the latest gossip?” Nye asked, giving Arthur a grin, a twinkle in his blue eyes.

“Ah, my wife and me, we been around a bit,” he answered, leaning an arm against the wall. “Bounty hunting, guard work, working ranches and drives down in Mexico and New Austin. Station men always know all the latest, and the stuff they don’t want posted for any random fool.”

Nye whistled between his teeth. “Mexico? Real pair of tough customers then.” He nodded to Sadie. “Begging your pardon, ma’am. You’re a right pretty woman too.”

She wasn’t sure whether to be flattered or roll her eyes at the awkward compliment, so she brushed past it. “Thing is,” she mirrored Arthur, leaning in on the other side of the barred window, “we got two real little ones. So we ain’t looking for no rough work, not right now, nor guaranteed overnight.”

Nye nodded. “Hard to make ends meet in this world today, ain’t it?” He leaned in closer, lowering his voice. “You ain’t interested in, uh, certain opportunities that some folk might find somewhat questionable? There’s a cache of whiskey as needs, ah, ‘retrieving’ from--”

“Ain’t interested in helping some yokel ‘misplace’ liquor,” Arthur said, and something decisive and sharp in his tone made Nye blanch a bit. “We ain’t that kind of folk.” 

Nye nodded hastily, mopping his forehead with the back of his hand. “Understood, sir. Quite understood. Sorry if I caused offense. Um. Well, if you’ve got a good horse, there’s running the mail to distant folk from Banner. I can pay a little for your time as mail couriers, and I imagine some folk will give you a bit of cash in gratitude for not having to wait to pick up their mail but once a quarter.”

“We could do that,” Sadie said with a nod. “Done it before.” She and Jake had, anyway, after picking up the mail packet from Hector down in Strawberry, and distributing it out. Before their neighbors all died or got scared off by the animals or the bandits, anyway. 

“Good. Then come see me before you leave town and I’ll have you sign for the mail pouch. You should also check in with Captain Crozier at the Mountie post also. I know you said you ain’t looking to get into dangerous work, but who knows, he might have something else anyway. He’s shorthanded right now, I know that.”

Arthur fished in his vest pocket, pulling out a piece of paper. “This authorization is from Chief Rains Fall of the Heha--Wapiti. I guess he’s on your government rolls as, uh,” he unfolded the paper and read it, brows furrowing, “yeah, Christopher Rains Fall. Anyway. He signed this so my wife and me can pick up their supplies as was apparently still missing last week when Mr. Smith picked up the shipment.”

Sadie looked at the paper as Arthur put it down on the counter. She doubted Rains Fall himself had written the note, given the neatness of the handwriting spoke of someone who’d learned writing much younger than the middle-aged warrior Rains Fall had been when his people had been first forced onto a reservation, when he might have taken a notion to learn to better help his people. But the signature was bold and clear all the same. Arthur looked at Nye with a level, direct stare. “And given what a mess them shipments clearly are, if I were to ask around, am I gonna find that some things went missing under your care in the past?” Voice cool as spring water, but the implied threat was there all the same, Arthur taking on the intent, menacing air of something like a great, fierce wolf. “Now, a little corruption’s the oldest game in the book for a station agent, and me, I don’t mind a hardworking fella carving himself some bacon off a fat rich hog as will hardly miss it. But I’d hate to believe a fella such as you should be so careless as to misplace things that good folk are counting on for feeding, clothing, and sheltering themselves and their kids.” 

He leaned in even closer, now putting a hand down on the counter. “So, James Nye, I assume we understand each other and everything going to the tribe is here that should be?”

Nye nodded hastily. From the look in his eyes, and the redness in his face, he’d clearly been skimming a bit. 

“Good.” Arthur practically purred the word, picking up Rains Fall’s authorization note. “Then you’ll have that waiting for us too when we’re ready to leave town.”

Leaving him there, Sadie grabbed one notice tacked to the corner of the booth, rather than the station. “Some fella looking for pelts, if nothing else.”

Arthur shrugged. “Every bit helps, I suppose.” He headed down the steps. “You wanna check in with the Mounties, or see what else we can find?” He turned to her, and gave her that smile of his. “Lady’s choice. Business or pleasure?”

“Oh, business first,” she said, giving him a decisive nod, and a knowing wink. “Pleasure comes later, I assure you.” He let out a slow, soft chuckle at that which warmed her up from the inside, all sorts of wicked promise to it. "Shopping, though, then dinner. Gotta keep your strength up."

Getting the shopping list done down at the general store and the gunsmith's, having their purchases held until they were ready to leave town, they had a quick dinner in the saloon. A solid, unpretentious place, but the beef stew proved delicious, with pillow-soft fresh bread for mopping up the gravy. Headed down the street to the Mountie post, she couldn’t help but scan the posters there all the same, out of force of habit. Not really wanting to see the active bounties, since they weren’t looking to chase any of them, and compared to down south, there were relatively few posters. Mostly, she was looking for Dutch, or Micah, or possibly John, seeing if any of them were there. They weren’t.

But the posters that were there were hard to ignore. “It’s about even on the Canadian and American dollar, ain’t it?” she asked Arthur quietly.

“Yeah.” He sighed, looking at the posters himself, obviously sensing her thoughts. “Sure. One, maybe two, and we’d have that two hundred dollars right back. We take on the whole half-dozen sorry bastards posted here, we come out ahead. He shook his head, folding his arms over his chest. “Not unless there’s no other way,” he said, almost more to himself than to her. Then he raised his voice again so she could hear. “We hauled in a couple of meek cowards, sure, but most everyone’s going to fight to survive when they know there’s a noose if they don’t.” 

“Feels like too much risk,” she agreed with reluctance, shaking her head. “Even some dumbass cattle rustler might get lucky with his bullets.” She flicked the poster for Geoffrey Durant with one finger. “That risk ain’t worth thirty bucks and getting shot at for our trouble.” Though some of them--wouldn't it be worth a little risk to be done with the nagging worry? If they were lucky, maybe some of those bounties were within a day's ride. Still, the thought of leaving Bea and Mattie hurt.

“Are you two bounty hunters, then?” She heard the voice, and turned to see the man coming towards them, having come into the front office from the back of the station. Scarlet coat, dark pants with a gold stripe down the sides. “Or were, I should say?” 

She nodded. “We was on the bounty game, yeah, but we’re off it a while. Our babies are real young yet.”

He glanced at Arthur briefly, then regarded her with interest. “Don’t see female bounty hunters much.”

“Bother you, then?” Arthur asked, and she could sense that intense edge building in him.

“Can’t say it does. I figure if a woman can be a talented criminal, and I’ve seen a few, might be as there are women who’d make a decent go on holding up the right side of the law.” He shrugged. “The government happens to disagree, mind. So what can I do for you?”

“Captain Crozier, I assume?” she asked him, seeing his nod of acknowledgment. “We’re staying up on the Minnewakan reserve with our friends, but so long as we’re here, Mr. Nye at the station said we should ask if you had anything as needed doing. We ain’t afraid of honest work, my husband and me, but it’s gotta be no shooting involved. Can’t risk it just now.”

Frazier nodded, reaching up and stroking one end of his mustache in a mindless gesture she recognized must have been force of habit. He had the unfortunate contrast of ginger hair against that flaming red jacket, but she had to admit, it flattered him all the same. She suspected there were few men it wouldn’t flatter, and wondered with some amusement if she ought to write Mary-Beth suggesting she feature a Canadian Mountie as her next romantic hero. She was confident it would sell. “Happens as there’s an investigation I was going to make tonight, but it seems I’m busy taking statements on a murder out at a homestead.” He let out a low whistle. “Nasty business. And since Sergeant Daley died two weeks ago of pneumonia, and Lieutenant Hoffman’s on bereavement leave, I have the honor to be the sole representative of His Majesty’s Royal Canadian Mounted Police for the Banner detachment at the moment.” From the weary stoop to his shoulders, and the bags under his eyes, it had been a hard time. “So, if you’re up for playing a role, and investigating a potential charlatan, by all means, sir, I will happily deputize you as an officer for the evening. You too, ma’am, as I really don’t give a damn what Ottawa says until they send me more fu--more men.”

“He was a deputy in Rhodes,” she chimed in cheerfully, and felt Arthur’s elbow digging into her ribs in annoyance.

“Any reason you left the law?” Crozier said, eyeing Arthur steadily.

“Leigh Gray was corrupt as anything. Using the position for family interests. So then rather than attaching myself to another lawman’s post, it seemed better to chase bounties, given my wife and me could do it together. As you said,” Arthur’s tone was equally calm as Crozier’s, “ain’t a government who’ll admit a woman can do the job and actually hire her.”

Crozier gave a brisk nod. “Good enough. Then this might work. No bullets. Real civilized. There’s this Spiritualist, Seth Byers, who’s set up shop these past few months. Roaming act, he is, and parked his wagon here in Banner. Pain in my ass.”

“Spiritualist?” Sadie said. “What, fella’s holding seances and talking spirit rappings and all that?” She’d heard of them, but it wasn’t like they’d made a habit of frequenting places like Tumbleweed and the Grizzlies. She’d seen the advertisement for one in St. Denis, but busy as she was with care for the living, and the dying in Arthur’s case, she hadn’t had much time or thought to spare towards the notion of perhaps being able to talk to Jake again. Though maybe that had been her fear of doing so as much as anything. Now? She’d dreamed him that night in Colter, and that felt like enough, knowing it for the goodbye they hadn’t gotten. Yet, if she were honest, how hard would it be to turn down the idea of talking to him again, not as a husband she was giving a proper farewell, but simply to hear from a beloved lifelong friend she still missed? 

His reply was a swift shrug. “I think it’s bunkum myself, but if it comforts people in their losses, I suppose that’s not illegal, even if it does feel tawdry taking advantage of grief like that. However, I guarantee he’s a smug and odious little rat-faced shit who must be lying through his teeth.” 

She couldn’t help but like him, blunt and seemingly honest as he was. “Then what’s the issue?” 

Arthur gave a swift snort of amusement. “Last time I run into some fella claiming he had some mystic communion with spirits, he was holding this whole village mesmerized by this claim of a curse. Turns out they was all just gone crazy from drinking water poisoned by a mining company.”

“Funny you should mention that,” Crozier said, sitting down on the edge of his desk, leaning back on his hands. “I suspect he’s a poisoner. Though without a regular doctor in these parts to examine it, about all I know is people drank it, and some suffered badly, and two folks have died after visiting him. Wasn’t pretty, I tell you, not one bit. But I can’t get my hands on any of it. Apparently he makes drinking it a part of his damn seances. Some tea he claims is part of accessing the spirits.”

“So you want us to--”

“I’d like you two to go to his seance, get some of that stuff without him knowing, and bring it on back. Also gather impressions.” Crozier eyed Arthur. “If I’m deputizing you for this investigation, however, I expect you to wear the uniform and while you’ll be lying through your teeth about who you are and why a Mountie is there, you’ll conduct yourself appropriately. As a deputy with scruples enough to walk away from a sheriff who disgraced the badge, I don’t expect that’ll be an issue?”

“Nope, don’t see that it should be,” Arthur answered, after only a split second of hesitation.

Crozier acknowledged that with a brisk nod. “Good. Then you can borrow Daley’s uniform and badge. He looks to have been about of a size to you. I’d suggest you claim to be dropping in on me while traveling to your post further west. You’re about the right age to have worked your way to sergeant.” She heard Arthur’s low grumble at that. “Ma’am, we have some things left behind by various women who quit this town. I seem to remember some dresses that might suit.”

Led to the back room, she found a skirt and bodice that looked about right, bright golden yellow with some dramatic black piping. Whoever had left it had a sense of style she couldn’t help but admire, and a fine tailor. It fit her well enough, though it would have been even better ten pounds ago, though she’d come to accept that the extra padding on her body after giving birth to two children wasn’t going away, nor should she worry about it. Arthur seemed appreciative enough, besides. There was an empty bottle of perfume in one trunk, which she tucked in her pocket--it would be useful if she could get some of that tea into it.

Quickly redoing her hair from a practical braid towards the softer style of a chignon, more suited to the outfit and the notion of a respectable sergeant’s wife maybe trying too hard to dress and impress a little bit above her station, she headed back into the office. Arthur stood there, buttoning up the scarlet jacket, and it flattered him enough that she itched to drag him to the hotel right then and there and get him out of it. “Well, Mrs.--who we gonna be tonight, anyhow?” he asked, offering her his arm, looking her up and down with an admiring glance that told her that yes, the outfit looked good on her.

“Kilgore. Sergeant and Mrs. Kilgore,” she said, seeing the delight dancing in his eyes at that, hearing his low chuckle.

“Kilgore it is. Then we’d best be on our way to the seance, Julia. Our dear friend Simon,” gesturing towards Crozier, “kindly directed us to the wagon. He’s a skeptic, sure, but I say more things in heaven and earth, ain’t there?”

“Of course, Tassy,” she said sweetly, and caught Crozier shaking his head slightly, looking amused as anything, and took the arm Arthur offered her, heading out into the early spring evening. “Let’s be on our way, then.”

~~~~~~~~~~

**Sadie’s Journal**  
We been here near a week now and settled in, and I wasn’t around them back in ‘99 as much as Arthur and Charles but seems I am still remembered fondly enough by the people for helping hunt for them. There’s guilt to that since helping folk screwed by the government far harder than me and Jake ever was took hard second place to my crazy need for O’DRISCOLL blood, and destroying their entire Godforsaken gang. Charles was by far a better person than me. Arthur too.

They call me a warrior but feels like there weren’t much honor in all them killings. I still can’t regret ridding the world of Colm and his foul minions but sometimes I look back on how lost I was, the beast I become, and I shudder.

The women worry. Like most women, the mood of their men holds too much power over their well being and safety and the men here, like Laughing Woman says, don’t have much to give them pride or hope. It makes them angry. Surly, even. Same mood I saw in Dutch’s gang with some of them boys, men without a path who was only too happy to listen to a charismatic monster. But Rains Fall and Paytah are no Dutch so there’s that at least. As usual the women are trying to keep it all together, feed their kids, and keep the ragged fabric of things stitched together. 

I worry too. Arthur and me ain’t stuck here like the tribe’s folk, and ain’t like I am being forced to put aside the ways of my people. But we find common ground too, us women, in wondering what future we have and just how we will keep our kids fed and safe in a world that seems to have no love for any of us.

 **Tune and lyrics for various Hehakaton songs** , including work songs, hunting songs, gaming songs, war songs, lullabies, etc.

 **Collection Notes** : “Recorded at the Minnewakan reserve of the Hehakaton tribe, New Caledonia, Canada, summer 1904, from various members of the tribe. Specific names noted where possible.” 

**Personal Notes** : “They’re so eager to see these songs written down, before they’re lost entirely. It’s hard to record them. I’m transcribing Hehakaton words as best I can and like as not making a poor job of it. Red Shawl does her best to help me. The tone, the notes, don’t easily fit with the way I know. They was storytellers, not storywriters, and so they got a song for just about everything, or at least they did. There’s something eerily beautiful about them that can’t be captured on a musical scale. The soul of these people, I guess I’d call it, if I had to put a name to it, and a thing the Canadians seem as determined as the Americans to stamp out and replace with proper Christian hymns. Makes me real sad to see it.”


	36. Minnewakan: Further Questions of Faith and Wisdom II

Heading out from the Mountie station, wishing already he could take off the damn silly hat, he waited for them to walk down a few buildings before guiding Sadie into an alleyway between the saloon and an obviously long-shuttered doctor’s office with dusty and cracked windows, a board nailed over one where the broken hole in the glass was big enough for what he judged from experience would need to be a young and lithe kid, probably under twelve, to slip inside and go looting. Going stealing in a doctor’s office, though--was there a local opium fiend of some kind, perhaps? Who knew.

Shaking away that with an effort, he turned to Sadie. “Thought we ought to take a couple minutes to get things straight. Talk our story over.” 

“Hosea’s teaching there, huh?” She smiled.

“Yeah, of course. The man was crooked as a dog’s hind leg, but damn if he wasn’t a master con artist.” She ended up staying half a step back from him because of the ridiculously broad sweep of that huge hat. He eyed it, thinking all the gewgaws felt tastelessly overdone, feathers and netting and ribbons and what looked like fake jewels. Algernon’s creations had a certain beauty, even the overly exuberant ones, and he could see the thoughtful mind and eye behind them. This hat was some kind of overbearing monstrosity, pure noise. Squinting to spy one particular bit among the ostrich plumes, he had to ask, “Is that a stuffed finch?”

“I didn’t take a look except how delightfully horrible the whole effect is,” she said dryly. “I’m trusting Mrs. Kilgore is a somewhat insecure creature thinking gaudy makes her look richer and more important. Gonna try to impress the yokels out in--where was it we was headed again, Tacitus?”

He thought of the Canadian map, trying to come up with a name further west, like Crozier had suggested. “Uh--Saskatchewan. Long Prairie. Northwest of Moose Jaw. Two horse town, as I understand it. I’m somewhat disappointed by that posting, but being the dutiful fella that I am, you and me are gonna make the best of it.”

“Of course. And being the dutiful wife that I am, I’m making it my job to bring some culture to them poor folk out there.” She gave him a coquettish smile.

“We moved up here, what, five years back now?”

“Right. We met then. You was a lawman in Texas, but things got tough there, the sheriff was corrupt, and you remember, my sister said there was good opportunity to be found up here.” She looked at him, that smile turning to a more familiar one that told him he was in for a fine night when they got back to Minnewakan. “By the way, that uniform looks real good on you.”

It felt like the costume it was, but he’d take the compliment all the same. “And you make a very fine, if cheerfully gaudy, lady about town.”

The smile vanished like snow under spring sun, sliding away. “I love it, of course,” he reassured her hastily, not certain where he’d put a foot wrong. “How you fuss about your clothes and how much you love them foolish hats. Love everything about you, Julia.”

She shook her head, causing him to see that yes, it was a damn stuffed finch. “Ain’t that, Arthur.” That told him she was talking truth now, not the tale they were spinning. “Just thinking of the last time we done a thing like this.”

St. Denis, of course, him in the heavy blue wool frock coat and helmet, her in a lady’s fine dress there too. The look in her eyes seemed a bit haunted. “Won’t be nothing like that, Sadie,” he reassured her.

“Sure. I know that. No gunplay. But it’s not that I’m thinking about. It’s how I was. Almost disappointed me that every time, them O’Driscolls couldn’t kill me. Nobody from the gang, thank God, but I know there was innocent folk who got hurt, and killed, when I went crazy enough to not care where I started a fight with them and the bullets started flying. Especially in St. Denis. There was--I _saw_ this couple in that square, dead as anything. Bullet right between her eyes, him shot in the back. He was laying half on her, like he’d been leaning over her to check on her.” She bit her lip, a rough, pained edge entering her voice. “Don’t know if it was us, O’Driscolls, or lawmen who actually shot them, but it was me that started it that day. Cause I didn’t care about nothing but a chance at killing more of them.” She looked away, down towards the dead end of the alleyway where a wooden fence stood towards a pigsty, if the smell was any indicator. “But even seeing that, couldn’t seem to stop myself. I knew I was no better than them. That was when I told myself I’d have to take it to them. Wipe them all out at Hanging Dog. Cause I didn’t want to get more innocent folk killed.” She looked over at him, eyes agonized. “If I’d gotten you killed…times I feel maybe Dutch and me got along for them months cause we was just the same.” 

What to say? He couldn’t brush it off as nothing, not with the weight he carried around inside of him, knowing he’d cost innocent people with his own actions. She’d never spoken about it this bluntly before, and he’d missed those dead people in Guiteau Square, seeing it through a rifle scope as he had, trying only to pick targets in the chaos. And it was true, she’d spun so far off her axis at a certain point that she’d made him angry with her violent recklessness, frightened him too in some ways. But she’d come out of that dive into the abyss, and since, tried to talk him out of his own head when he got caught in the downward spiral of his own guilt. “You worry you’re like Dutch? You turned back from all that in the end. You hated how you was. He just kept lying, making more excuses, killing more folk. You kept people alive after the bank robbery went bad. You made that plan to save John. You worried about John and Abigail, and me. Dutch left me for dead on that mountain right at his feet, and wasn’t the first time. You thought there was no chance I was alive, but you cared enough to ride back just to _bury_ me, all right? So don’t you talk nonsense like that.”

Putting a hand on her shoulder, squeezing just hard enough to make the point, he added, “Ain’t like you’ve been going around picking fights to shoot people, Sadie. So maybe you and me are gonna go and keep doing what good we can, all right? Including getting this idiot Byers before he hurts more folk.”

“All right.” She straightened her shoulders at that, eyes and voice going calmer. “So why are we going to a seance? Who’s dead that we’re looking to contact?”

“Can we please agree,” he said, unable to help a bit of awkwardness in his own tone, “no lovers, no kids? Drawing from reality’s good, it keeps the act more instinctive, but some things is too close to home.” The last thing he wanted was to draw upon Eliza or Isaac for this. Particularly if by some insane chance--ridiculously tiny, but there was enough strangeness in the world he wouldn’t rule it out entirely, and hadn’t he talked to Hosea himself in that dream--Seth Byers actually had some kind of genuine connection to spirits.

She nodded in reply to that, agreeing to it quickly. “Your father?” she asked.

“Oh, my dear departed daddy, who was damn near a saint? That’s about as far from the truth as you can get,” he said, unable to help the glib sarcasm. Dutch had certainly failed him, his actual father had beaten him, and well, Hosea would be the last person to describe himself as a saint, or a good father, but he’d tried, done far more than Arthur had been smart enough to see at the time. “It’ll suit better, for all that.” 

She gestured back towards the walkway. “All right then, let’s go. The rest, we figure out as we need it. No point getting stuck in too complicated a story. Follow each other’s lead, right?”

He couldn’t help but smile at that. “You’re a hell of a triggerwoman, but I’m thinking you’re a born conwoman besides. Shame we found you when we did, with things as rough as they was, and not ten, fifteen years earlier when it was a lot less gunplay and a lot more cons.” He realized only too late that for that notion to even be possible, it would have meant no Jake in her life, and her parents gone even earlier, and cursed himself quietly. “Sorry. For sure, you had a happy life. Dutch drew us all in cause we was such lost folk. I wouldn’t wish that on you.”

Her hand tightened on his forearm, but in reassurance, not disapproval, because he could feel the difference. “Ain’t no insult,” she told him gently enough. “Things went a bit different in my life, maybe that could have been so.”

For a moment he couldn’t help but wish it had been. That he’d known her when they were both young, that perhaps all the foolish hope and mistakes and heartache with Mary and Eliza hadn’t happened. Both of them would have been better off for it. Wishing that he could have had what John had, as usual, gotten handed right to him without effort--a woman who could live that life with him, and looked at him with a smile and love in her eyes. But no matter. He’d had to wait, and suffer, and struggle, but chances were he cherished Sadie, and their kids, all the more for it. 

Byers' wagon was parked on the eastern end of town, proclaiming “SETH BYERS, ESQ, MEDIUM AND CONDUIT TO THE DEARLY DEPARTED” and he couldn’t help but suppress a sigh at that. Traveling conjurer--he’d seen their ilk before. Enough of an unimpressive quack to not make his living with big impressive shows in a big city like famous Spiritualists did. Sadie rapped politely on the wooden door at the back painted with what probably were intended as arcane symbols.

He jerked a thumb towards them, dryly noting, “Greek letters, Egyptian hieroglyphics, and I swear to God that’s a winged cock--” 

She suppressed a snicker, elbowing him in the ribs. “Shut up.”

“It is indeed, my good fellow,” and the door swung open as a man he presumed was Byers chose that moment to make his entrance, proclaiming dramatically, “the symbol of the Roman god Priapus!”

“There’s a god of peckers?” Sadie asked dubiously, eyeing the painting, and then the man before them. He reminded Arthur of nobody so much as Josiah Trelawney--nattily dressed, neatly groomed, that same posh, plummy accent. Plus Sadie playing the role of the woman dressed like what she thought was a fine lady but having a farm-wife’s mouth still came across perfect for what she’d been thinking, a coarse and somewhat silly type yearning above her station.

“Why, yes, it’s the good luck charm of Priapus, lifegiver!” the man chirped. “Though of course one has to paint such things somewhat abstractly, given, ah, obscenity laws. You’re very observant, sir, most take no notice. Are you an artist, perchance?”

“I knew men worshipped their dicks,” Sadie muttered to him in Spanish, “but _really_?” He managed to keep a straight face only with effort.

“Well, don't that beat all. A god dedicated to cocks? No, mister, afraid what scribblings I make look like a kid done it, just about,” he said, putting on his own air of dumb affability. “Are you Mr. Byers?”

“Yes, but _Dr._ Byers, if you please.” 

He debated asking to see the man’s degree, but wryly held back. He held his hands up. “Sorry. That wasn’t told to us. Only that, well, you’re a fella who can talk to the world beyond.”

“Oh, certainly.” Byers beamed, his big blue eyes genial and warm. “For a moment I wondered why a brave man of the law would be coming here, though the presence of this gentle creature by your side,” he gestured to Sadie, “told me the matter must be personal, not professional.”

“Yeah, just passing through Banner,” Sadie chimed in. “We said howdy to Captain Crozier, but Tassy here’s been assigned out west. Long Prairie.” She made a face. “Took us a real good map to find it, I’m afraid.” 

“Sergeant Tacitus Kilgore.” He held out a hand. “My pa was real fond of them Greeks--or maybe it was Romans? Blame the name on him. And my wife,” he nodded towards Sadie, “Julia.”

Byers shook Arthur’s hand, and touched the brim of his hat in Sadie’s direction. “You don’t sound Canadian, so I suspect a tale there.” Holding the door open, he gestured them up the steps into the wagon. “Do come in, and let’s hear it.”

“We was both down in Texas, and Tassy was working as a lawman down there, about five years back. But the sheriff--well, I don’t like to speak ill of a man, dead or alive, but…” Sadie let out a sharp grumble. “He weren’t fit to wear the badge, you see. And then Tassy’s daddy died--such a fine man, I miss him dreadfully still. Though at least he lived long enough to bless us and see us married!”

Clearly Julia did much of the talking in the marriage, which he was fine with, because that gave him more time to look around and take in things. Not to mention he didn’t have Hosea’s silver tongue. The less he could say, the better. “He was a lawman too. Texas Ranger, no less, back in them days when the frontier was real wild.” Talking just a little too much, feeding the man too much information that he could use to spin his own story and the trap within, noticing Byers listening with rapt attention to every detail of it. “But Julia’s sister had heard chances might be better up here in Canada, so we come north.”

“Your father sounds a fine man, Sergeant Kilgore, and clearly much missed. Is it seeking him that brings him here today?” Arthur nodded at that, putting the baited hook out there. “What was his name, so that I can better search to bring him to the doorway between the words?”

“Horatio Kilgore.” He gave a rueful grin, shrugging. “My family does like its unusual names.” The part of the wagon they stepped up into was small and crowded. Presumably all the better for hiding things. It held a table with four chairs, covered by a dark floor-length tablecloth. Shelves covered the sides, crowded with all kinds of jars and bottles and boxes. He recognized some of the herbs and the like, but not others.

“It’s one of the things I love most about you, Tassy dear,” she teased him, tossing her head and giving a high, silvery laugh. “It’s charming.”

Byers gestured to the table. “Well, why don’t you both have a seat, and I’ll make the preparations.” Arthur took off his hat, glad to be rid of the thing for the moment. Watching both of them sit, and then lighting a single blue candle on the tabletop, he twitched the heavy velvet curtains closed. The atmosphere immediately turned dark, almost heavy, everything beyond that single candle cast in pools of shadowed darkness, except a tiny flame of a burner beneath the tea kettle in the corner.

He’d had to operate in the gloom of near-dark long years ago, picking pockets and locks, doing his best work in the shadows of dimly lit alleyways and back entrances, and at night when visibility was down and so was people’s guard after dinner or the theater or a gentleman’s club and brothel. Bold kids in St. Denis, but not the brightest to try to snatch things openly in broad daylight. The only good daylight pickings had been from distracted women out doing their shopping, and encumbered by those massive skirts that meant they didn’t feel a thing when he clipped their purse. 

So now he tried to do his best to summon those twilight senses again, focusing as hard as he could with limited sight and hearing things being moved on shelves to identify where it was. From the sound of a cork, the scrape of unscrewed metal, the snap of a clasp, he could tell whether it was a bottle, jar, or box. Some he heard nothing--a pouch, maybe? 

“My, it sure is quiet in here,” Sadie said with a nervous laugh. “Don’t mind me, Doctor. I suppose silent and solemn is better for contacting spirits, ain’t it?”

“It is indeed, ma’am.” He silently thanked her for that insight, giving an excuse to keep quiet so they could keep listening intently as Byers presumably kept dumping stuff in that teapot. 

Another small point of light flickered to life under a brazier in the corner behind Byers’ chair. Shortly after, a pungent, almost skunky herbal smell wafted up that he recognized. Some of the vaqueros down in Nuevo Paraiso rolled it, rather than tobacco, into their cigarettes. From their reactions, that particular herb gave them a fine, mellow time. 

“What is it you’re putting in that tea?” he asked, wondering if the man would be foolish enough to divulge anything.

“Various herbs and ingredients, which were taught to me by a wise medicine man of the Pamawatchee tribe years ago. I’m afraid he swore me to an oath of secrecy, so I can’t divulge them to anyone who hasn’t been through the mysteries of their Great Ghost Caller rites. You must understand.”

He decided to play along, though he was just about certain that tribe name was utter bullshit made up by some fool who decided it sounded Indian enough. But then, Tacitus Kilgore was a kindly, well-meaning lunkhead. “Pamawatchee? Think I run across some of them in my day, out Arizona way. Fierce warriors.”

“Just so,” Byers acknowledged with a chuckle. “Captured me out in the desert, they did, but well, their shaman saw something in me, so he took me in, treated me as a son. Offered to make me his son-in-law, but, well, lovely as his daughter was, my heart still belonged to a sweet girl who I lost to tuberculosis. Hence my interest in the spirits.”

“Tuberculosis, ain’t that unfortunate.” Given that particular dime novel tale, he managed to keep the cynical edge from his voice only with effort. Willing his damn traitor lungs to behave, given the thick scent of the herb in the air, hoping the vapors of it wouldn’t irritate them.

Byers sat down, pouring the tea into a teacup that looked like good Chinese porcelain from what Arthur had seen, and gestured to it. “Drink, and open yourselves to the spirit world.” 

The darkness helped, as did having large hands that could somewhat hide things from view. He took the teacup first, and touched it briefly to his lips, tasting something bitter and noxious and to judge from it, containing a hefty slug of moonshine among other things, and managed to spill most of it on the side of the dark tablecloth so it would seem he drank the whole cup down. He passed the cup back to Byers to Sadie. “That’s, uh, got some kick to it.” 

He refilled it and passed it to Sadie. Lifting it delicately to her lips, she looked to take a sip, then started in a fit of coughing as if from the taste, dropping the cup. He heard it shatter on the wooden floorboards of the wagon. “Oh no,” she cried in chagrin, “dear Doctor, I’m so sorry!”

“Never you mind, dear lady,” Byers said, getting up out of his seat hastily, “I’ll just,” he grabbed the candle and took it with him, whipping a rag off one of the shelves, “get this cleaned up so that you needn’t worry about stepping on it. Hopefully you didn’t spill any on that lovely skirt!”

“Here, sweetheart, I saw another cup,” he said, grabbing one from the shelves and quickly putting it on the table behind him, not even looking towards Sadie, already trying to find by feel and memory what components the man had likely pulled. Passing over two bottles with nowhere to put liquid contents, he told himself he’d try to get a look at them before leaving the wagon, yanking out his handkerchief, he tried to keep his hands as quiet and deft as he could as managed to grab a jar, a box, and a pouch and stuff a pinch of their dry components into them, Sadie chattering away apologizing over and over to provide cover for any noise. Eventually Byers’ grunt of effort to rise told Arthur his time was running out. He sat back down again, shoving the wadded-up handkerchief back into his pocket.

When the candle came back, Sadie gave a charming hiccup and a lopsided, almost drunken grin. “That stuff’s potent for sure.”

“Now, we form a circle of hands.” He ended up holding Byers’ hand in his right, Sadie’s in his left, hoping he’d managed to wipe any traces of his delving into the shelves off his fingers and there was no powder or the like to be felt there.

“Spirits!” Byers intoned, “I call upon you to open the door between worlds, to listen to the pleas of those who labor still in the world of the living. A son longs, _needs_ to hear from his father. Come to us now, and speak, Horatio Kilgore!”

 _What kind of cut rate bullshit is this anyway?_ Most Spiritualists he’d read about in newspapers went about this business with a little more fanfare, but probably less crazy potions. Byers coughed, then coughed again. Gave a dry little chuckle. “Real sorry I missed this adventure, son,” he said. “Couldn’t have done it better myself.”

The hair rose on the back of his neck, and he froze, because for just a moment, the laugh, the intonation, even the faint nasal edge to the accent--Hosea? He stopped himself from saying the name, but barely, and he knew he gripped both of their hands even tighter instinctively. That damn herbal smoke was making his head swim too, which didn’t help.

“Horatio...Kilgore?” Byer’s voice was back to normal, and he sounded strained, confused. As if he hadn’t expected that to actually _work_. He tried again, voice stronger and more confident. “Horatio Kilgore, is that you?”

Sadie got up in a rush. “I’m so sorry, Dr. Byers, but I think I’m--I feel very sick just now.” Pushing up from the table, she headed for the stairs in a hurry, shoving her way out the door. Byers followed her, and he got up himself to follow her, taking the chance, and the sunlight streaming in from the open door, to steal a glance at two bottles right near each other--moonshine, as he’d guessed, and laudanum. 

Heading down the steps of the wagon, he found Sadie perched on a rock, head in her hands, groaning dramatically, her ridiculous hat on the grass beside her. “Julia, darling, you gonna be OK?”

“Oh, I’ll be fine,” she said, looking up and giving him a faint, watery smile. “I’m so sorry I interrupted the seance.” 

He took her hand in his. “Never mind that.”

“The world of the spirits can be too intense for females, I’m afraid, given their weaker constitutions,” Byers intoned with grave authority. “Would you like to try again, Sergeant, while Mrs. Kilgore awaits?”

“No, I think I’m gonna take Mrs. Kilgore back to our room,” he said.

Sadie’s hand flew to her neck, and her eyes went wide in alarm. “My necklace! Oh, Tassy, it must have come off. I was trying to tug my collar loose, I must have--oh dear.”

“I know that one’s your favorite,” he said. He glanced at Byers. “Her momma gave it to her before she passed. You mind if I go find it, and you sit with her?” He saw what Sadie was doing right then, buying him time, but kept himself from grinning with pride at her cunning.

“Certainly.” 

Sadie reached for him, hugging him tightly. “You’re such a dear to put up with my foolishness.” She whispered lowly in his ear, “It’s right under my chair. You got a few minutes if you need them.”

He headed back into the wagon, wishing he had a bandana on to tug over his face against the still-pungent reek. He opened the curtains, which a man looking for his wife’s necklace would do, and found it in about two seconds right where she said it would be, eyeing the chinks in the floorboards nearby and choosing to use that to his advantage. Quickly, he scanned the shelves again, grabbing the one last jar he hadn’t been able to get to previously, and giving a snort of amusement as he recognized the small dried button-like things he held in his palm, even without the label on the jar. Tucking a few of them into his handkerchief, he put it away again.

Pretending to search for a few minutes, he scanned the shelves again, seeing the labels, filing them away in his memory. Noting that Byers had different storage containers, different sizes and shapes, different stoppers on bottles, so he could easily grab the correct ones in the gloom by feel.

Heading down from the wagon, he called, crouching to make his way under the wagon, “Didn’t find it inside, but let me look in the grass here. I’m wondering if it fell through a crack in the floorboards.” 

Taking about thirty seconds to crawl around down there and pretend to search in the grass, he yelled cheerfully, “Got it!” Heading back to the two of them, he handed her the gold locket, helping her fasten it around her neck again. Crouching down in front of her, he asked her, “You all right to head out, sweetheart?”

“Oh, sure. My head’s a lot clearer,” she said with a smile.

“I hate to discuss the matter of payment given you didn’t get to speak to your father, sir,” Byers said apologetically, “but those ingredients are rare, and obtained with some difficulty.”

He gave Byers a bright smile. “No trouble. I’m pretty sure that was my pa there, even if just for a moment.” He suspected Hosea might just have found some way to take part in one more con, and probably enjoyed seeing Arthur and Sadie at work together, just as he and Bessie used to do. “What do we owe you?”

“Eight dollars.”

Handing it over, he couldn’t help wondering if he should pickpocket the man’s watch in recompense, given that loose chain practically begged him to do so, but decided against it. It wouldn’t be the best move. He’d just tell Captain Crozier to add eight dollars to their payment, thanks very much. 

Heading back into town with her, he waited until they were out of sight, then pulled her behind a tree, doffing his own hat, glad she’d kept that stupid hat off and in her hand so he could kiss her soundly. She kissed him back every bit as enthusiastically, and maybe it was the last giddiness from the herbal fumes, maybe it was the moment of having pulled off one damn fine heist smooth as silk, but it was probably only the thought of that tree being a little too public and him being in that damn Mountie uniform that stopped him from hitching her skirts up right there. There was still that same surge of victory that had always come after a particularly good job, and having her there with him for it felt fine as anything. “Like I said, you make one born conwoman.”

She laughed, holding up a small glass bottle that looked like it came from perfume from its fluted curves, filled with a cloudy brown-green liquid. “Found this in one of them trunks with the top off. All the perfume evaporated, I guess. I got some of the actual tea in the bottle here rather than drinking it. You got the ingredients?”

He kissed her again, unable to help it. “You’re Goddamn brilliant. And yeah, I did.” Letting go, he said, “Let’s go make our report, I guess.”

Back in Crozier’s office a few minutes later, they waited until he came back from his interview, and as he walked in, he saw them and raised an eyebrow at the things placed on his desk. “Productive investigation, I see?”

“He’s a fourth-rat huckster who’s only conning people into thinking he’s got them communing with spirits cause he’s got them drugged out of their minds,” Arthur said dryly. “No wonder. He’s obviously either been to Mexico or read some kind of books, cause he’s got them inhaling marihuma fumes, then he’s got peyote in that tea besides.”

“I’m not familiar.”

“We run into it down south,” Sadie answered. “Marihuma’s what they call hemp leaves when they smoke it. And peyote,” she nudged the dried slices of it, “that’s dried cactus buds. Indians down there use it for visions. There’s a trade in it too.” She prodded more of the powders. “Licorice-root and sugar, if I'm to judge. Well, that’s harmless enough, I guess.”

“I saw the bottles he poured from, and those were moonshine and laudanum. From what I saw, most of that tea plus the marihuma fumes is gonna make you go outta your damn mind, but it’s this one that’s your problem.” He indicated the last one. “That’s belladonna, from the jar label.”

Sadie let out a low whistle. “Jimson weed, we call it, Captain. I’d recognize the plant, but not powder like that. The fruit from that's gonna make you see things, all right, but it’s poisonous as hell. Saw a fella die of it last year. I’m guessing the idiot read about them herbs and plants in articles and books as things that give folk visions, found a way to get them, and just threw them all together.”

“Shit,” Crozier sighed. “So he’s a reckless fool, not a cold-blooded killer. I’m not sure that’s much better in the end, and he’s getting arrested, either way.” He opened a drawer in his desk. “I assume Byers charged you for that supposed seance. How much?”

“Eight dollars.”

Crozier nodded idly at that, putting a stack of bills on the desk, and peeling off a few more to add to it. “There’s fifteen extra on top of your payment of forty. It’s the bounty I’d have had to put on him if he ran from town. Consider that your seance paid plus, shall we say, a consultation fee for so quickly identifying the stuff in that tonic for me with your expertise and sparing me the headache.”

Not a bad payday for work that hadn't needed any bullets or bloodshed. He reached out and picked up the money, tucking it away in his pocket. “Much obliged, Captain. We’ll change and be on our way for the evening, though, if you don’t mind. Still gotta load a few things back at the station and get back to Minnewakan tonight, and we’re already gonna be there well after dark.”

“I respect you wanting to work with your wife, but if you’ve got friends on the reserve and a notion to stick around, I wouldn’t mind making you a Mountie for more than an evening, Griffith.”

He paused, weighing it, and saying as politely as he could, “Respect what you’re doing too, Captain, keeping folk safe. But from what I’ve seen, some of them laws, like passes to do damn near anything, are real harsh on my friends for no reason I can see, after they already got treated like shit by the American government. I don’t think I can wear a badge and have to hold up laws I can’t support. Like the passes. Or ones that say a wife becomes a man’s property.” 

“Perhaps. I don’t disagree with you. I go as easy as I can on some things. But if the likes of you and me don’t choose to be lawmen because of a few wrongly directed laws and overlook them where we can, only men who’ll be harsh about those laws will choose to wear a badge. You think on that some.”

There was some sense to that, though it seemed like hairsplitting to him in some ways. Like he’d told Sadie, the freedom to not go after those he felt were done wrong by the rotten parts of the system was something he couldn’t give up readily. But he recognized the compliment in the offer, trying to not smile at the strangeness that a man who’d been a notorious outlaw five years back could be deemed well-scrubbed enough to have a genuine offer to be a Canadian lawman. “Maybe.” He gently put the Mountie hat and badge down on Crozier’s desk, both returning them and making that his answer for the moment. “Thank you for the compliment, all the same.”

Changed back into his own clothes, he and Sadie made a quick job of it, not wanting to linger much longer in Banner given it was after eight and the last light was fast fading to the copper-and-rose tinges of sunset, and driving the wagon in the dark on still-unfamiliar roads would be no easy task. But Sadie was good with paths and navigation, so he was sure she remembered the way, and he was fairly sure he did besides.

Picking up their shopping, and then the supplies and the mail bag from Nye at the train station, they hit the trail, lanterns hung from the front corners of the wagon and casting pools of light ahead into the gathering shadows of night. Queenie and Bob stayed steady as ever, and before long, he allowed himself to relax into the drive. Kept an ear open for animals, of course, and a repeater at the ready across his knees plus his revolvers at his side, but it seemed like bandits were much less of a problem up here. Sadie had her own gunbelt by her side too for the ride.

He reached over and took her hand in his, where her free hand rested in her lap, the other hand loosely holding the reins. “Not a bad adventure for an evening,” he said, teasing her. “Plus some money made, huh?”

“It'll come in handy. Gotta buy or sew Bea some new clothes soon enough,” she said thoughtfully. “Though at least Mattie can start wearing her old gowns easy enough. Ain’t looking forward to a couple more years, when he starts wearing short pants and she’s in skirts.” 

“Oh, put off being practical for a few hours, Sadie. It can wait for morning, can’t it?”

She smiled then, and there was a glimmer of humor in her eyes. “Unless we want to buy the short pants for Bea first, let her wear those. Not sure I see a problem there. We can claim we’re just being smart, economical folk.” He couldn’t help but laugh at her turning practicality into humor, and a bit of sly assertion of Bea’s place in the world besides. She squeezed his hand. “Yeah, it can wait.” 

“You do a real fine job acting. Maybe we ought to think about a life on the stage.”

“Put off being practical, Arthur,” she said, gently mocking him. “It was kinda fun, though. Playing a part. And I suppose there’s something fair in two con artists taking down another.”

“He wasn’t no con artist.” He couldn’t help some tinge of anger in his tone. 

“What you mean by that? He was trying to run a scam sure as anything. You can’t tell me you actually believe that dumbass talks to spirits.”

“No, I don’t.” Whatever had maybe happened with Hosea there, or Arthur had only hurried to imagine it, was nothing of Byers’ doing. “But there’s limits, there’s a code, you see? Like we used to have in the gang, like the O’Driscolls never did. Con artists sell you happy dreams. Don’t matter if it’s a scam with some investment, or a fortune teller with a love charm. Run a sound con, you leave folk a little poorer, feeling a little foolish if they figure it out eventually, but it’s skimming some grease off the top, that’s all. They don’t do this kind of shit. Fake mediums. Quack doctoring. Selling get-rich-quick dreams to them as can’t afford it and ruining them by it. It’s feeding on pain and desperation, over and over. They ain’t con artists. They’re a bunch of Goddamn parasites.” Not fit to stand anywhere near the likes of Hosea or Trelawney, so far as he was concerned. They’d had a line once in the gang, and maybe they’d never been truly law-abiding people, but the tricks and scams and even the early robberies where they went out of their way to hurt nobody, and they’d tried to help people, they’d been something more than what they’d become, murderous thugs out only for their own and fulfilling Dutch’s whims rather than any kind of actual charitable ideal. Those lines, those distinctions, _mattered_ to him, even now. 

She stayed silent for a little while at that. “Suppose you’re right. Then all the better we took care of him before he hurt more folk.”

He sighed. “We did a good thing, you’re right. And I’m sorry. Didn’t mean to bring bad feelings to the evening.”

“Who said you did?” She turned to him with that knowing smile of hers. “We had an adventure when we was expecting nothing but biding some time in town. And we still got the night to ourselves.” She leaned in for a minute, lowering her voice. “For the record, if being behind that tree wasn’t so damn visible, I was thinking I wouldn’t have minded having you right there. Seems running a job like that gets your blood up, don’t it?”

“Oh, you was thinking that too? And lucky me, you wearing a skirt. Them pants look damn fine on you, but skirts would have made it real easy.” 

“We should have found an alleyway,” she said, laughing against his lips as she kissed him, quickly and lightly, just a teasing peck. She gave another flick of the reins, and drawled, “But looks like we’re just gonna have to wait a while, cause I ain’t stopping along this trail. Not at night.”

“You are one cruel woman, Sadie Griffith.” But he was laughing as he said it. “A bed sounds good anyway.” A comfortable bed, and ample time, and guaranteed privacy, all three of which never seemed to occur together these days. He fervently thanked Karen for taking not only the kids, but Dusty and Dido too, for the night.

The rest of the drive passed quickly enough, though the anticipation mounted. Little things, teasing each other in their impatience--another quick stolen kiss, the press of her hand on his thigh as she leaned over to grab the repeater as she handed him the reins, the “accidental” graze of his hand against her hip in return.

They still made it a point to take care of the wagon back at Minnewakan, because the tribe needed those supplies, and best for them to not sit out till morning in case of weather. Or the slight potential of theft. Many Winters was still awake, as it was well before midnight still, and let them into the commissary with the supplies, and the shopping requests for people to pick up in the morning. With several of the young men pitching in, it made for quick work unloading. Putting the wagon away, turning Bob and Queenie out with the other horses to graze, he grabbed the mail bag, and headed with Sadie back to their cabin, his hand brushing hers as they walked. Trying to not seem in a rush and invite ribald commentary by it by those who were still awake, but the eagerness was within him all the same.

He barely got the door closed and chucked the mail pouch on a chair, then getting his gunbelt off, when he felt her hand on his shoulder, strong and certain, turning him to her, and he kissed her, kissed her with all the pent-up wanting of months and months of wishing for a night like this, putting his arms around her and lifting her right up so he wouldn’t have to lean down to kiss her. She chuckled at that, a giddy and breathless sound, her knees and those strong thighs of hers gripping his hips to steady herself, taking some of her weight off his arms. She said, breath hot against his cheek, “Bed’s right over there, ain’t it?” before she kissed him again.

Taking the hint, he headed for the bed, laying her down as gently as he could, which probably wasn’t much given the sheer raw need in both of them right then. Not letting him pull away, one arm still around his shoulders, she headed right for the buttons of his pants, making it clear that she didn’t mean to wait.

Fine by him. “See?” he said, rucking up her skirt, finding the opening in her drawers, giving easy access to his fingers. “Skirt’s got its benefits.” No need to dawdle either, given he could feel how ready she was, but he took his time at it nonetheless, stroking in the way he knew she liked, feeling her move restlessly against his touch.

“Then you can wear one, and it'll look real fine,” she said, and he couldn’t see her eyes clearly in the darkness, but he heard the laughter in her voice. He made a face at that, remembering a certain heist from when he was seventeen, but didn’t reply. Her own fingers were deft and sure, freeing him from his pants and drawers, and he couldn't help but arch into her touch, certainly needing no help from her either towards being ready for the task at hand. “Pardon me if I ain’t being properly reverent of your pal Priapus here, but seems we’re kind of in a rush.”

“Oh, shut up,” he said, not sure whether to blush or to laugh, deciding the best answer was kissing her again, settling over her, settling inside of her, feeling her legs locked around his waist, her arms locked around his neck. “It don’t need a name.”

It turned fast and frenzied in a hurry, the headboard thumping against the cabin wall, and he heard the sounds they made, no need to worry about keeping as hushed as they could. He could tell this was going to go quickly for him, sensation gathering within him like the surge of incoming tide, but he’d coaxed and stroked her enough that she made it there before him, instinctively turning her face into his shoulder to muffle her gasp of pleasure even though there was no need tonight, still moving with him, and the sheer feel of it pushed him even faster towards that edge. He tried to pull back, but she stubbornly kept her legs wrapped tight around him, if anything, feeling like she was pulling him in even closer. “Sadie,” hearing an urgent note entering his voice, “I gotta…”

She hadn’t had time to put that sponge in, and they both knew the rare times since Mattie’s birth when they let themselves get caught up in the moment enough to not do that, he couldn’t finish inside her. He’d held to that, no matter how hard it was sometimes. With money an issue as it was at the moment, they certainly couldn’t risk a third baby just now. He wasn’t going to be a father to a child he couldn’t do right by, and that was that.

“It’s fine,” she said, nuzzling his jaw, urging him on with her hips against his. “Other folk are better with their herbs than Byers.”

He had a few seconds to puzzle that remark over, but caught up in the rush of pleasure, he couldn’t quite figure it. Realizing only too late that the overwhelming sensation hit him hard enough to leave him damn near mindless that he’d ended up lying there stunned with most of his weight on her and probably crushing her, he muttered an awkward, “Sorry,” rolling aside from her, a little embarrassed to have forgotten himself that much, feeling clumsy and foolish.

She patted him on the shoulder. “You worry too much. I'm fine.” Then she shrugged, and he caught the look on her face in the moonlight, her giving him a bit of an awkward, almost sheepish smile, as if it had hit her too exactly how much of a rush they’d been in just now. They hadn’t even gotten their boots off, let alone anything else. “Well, might as well get the clothes off now.”

She had a point there, and he set to work on that, unbuttoning his vest first and getting that off, then slipping his suspenders from his shoulders. Pants were already undone, after all, so it was easy to just let them fall. “So what’s that about, uh, herbs?” He heard the rustling of her behind him doing her own undressing.

“The women here taught me. Taking some wild carrot seed every day apparently does the trick.” She shook her head, giving a rueful laugh. “Them years up in the mountains that stuff grew everywhere, and I had no idea it was good for anything but using the roots for food and the flowers for some nice decoration.” 

“Not gonna find that one in an herblore compendium, sad to say.” Given they were written by men, and that sort of information wasn’t easily written down plainly thanks to some hysterical dumbasses in Washington and their notions of decency. “Guess it’s a good bit easier than messing with the sponge all the time.” 

She sighed. “Shit. Well, this camisole’s for the laundry. I got one clean one. Guess I know what we’re doing tomorrow.” He looked over his shoulder to see her stripping off her camisole, wet spots on the front of it making it obvious what had happened. He was used to it, given that had been a normal thing these past two years. Seemed like just about anything could make her milk come down, whether it was sex, Bea or Mattie crying, or just going too long without dealing with the buildup. “I should have figured. It’s been near twelve hours. I could feel the need coming on anyway.” She hitched up off the bed, heading for the washbasin, cleaning herself up.

He watched as he finished undoing his shirt, unable to help it, drinking in the sight of her cast in shadow and silver moonlight filtering through the window. But that was enough for only a moment. They'd had so much of shadows and silence. He wanted so much to look at her, to touch all of her, like he hadn't been able to in--well, however long it had been. He moved to the lantern, lighting it, wanting to look at her in its golden glow, but needing to wash up himself first. He kissed her shoulder, planning on kissing all of those freckles when he had the chance. He reached past her and grabbed the washrag himself , as she headed back to the bed.

“Uh,” she said, and barely suppressed laughter and awkwardness in her voice, “think I jabbed you in the ass with one of my spurs.” 

“What?” He turned, looking at where she pointed to the crumpled heap of his drawers on the floor, and saw what she meant. A small spot of blood on the cotton, and now that he saw it, it made sense of the slight twinge he’d felt in his left ass cheek once the whole riot was over and she’d let go of him. He sighed. “You wanna look, before I end up bleeding on the covers?” Handing her the rag, he turned away from her.

She swabbed quickly on the left cheek, like he’d thought. “Nothing much. Don’t hardly notice it.” She reached out and gave it a pat, then curving her hand around it, giving a squeeze. “Appreciate the nice view, though.” He rolled his eyes, though he smiled as he did it. “Want me to kiss it better?” she teased. 

“Nah, you ain’t among the folk I’d love to tell to kiss my ass,” he said, turning back to her, sitting down beside her, putting an arm around her and coaxing her to lie down with him, finding the pins in her hair and slipping them loose one by one, putting them on the nightstand. Letting her hair fall loose like a veil across his chest, twining it around his fingers, feeling her hand over his heart, tucking in tight against each other. No urgency just now, simply enjoying this peaceful moment of lying there bare and at their leisure, her skin warm and soft against his, no rush and no need to hide.

He couldn't say exactly how long it was before she spoke, but it was a good while. “Arthur?”

“Hm?”

Her fingers traced idle patterns on his chest. “No good time for it now. Bea and Mattie so young as they are, they’re enough of a handful with two at once. But maybe in a few years--I wouldn’t mind another baby.” She didn’t mention the money, and he was grateful for that, because they needed this right now, sharing some sweet dream together of hopes for their future. He'd said it well enough earlier. They could be practical tomorrow, but not tonight. 

He smiled, kissing the top of her head, thinking about that baby. He hadn't thought about it much, worrying about asking for too much given the two healthy, wonderful kids they had, but he did want that too. They weren't young, no, but they weren't quite so old yet that he'd feel guilty about having another baby, concerned he wouldn't be there as they grew up. “That’d be real fine. Though maybe we’d better do two again. Bea and Mattie got each other. Don’t want another one left lonely.”

“Sure, sign _me_ up for that, you ain’t the one bearing them.”

He knew she’d meant it lightheartedly, but he took it seriously all the same. This time he’d been there for all of it, seen how pregnancy and birth and nursing and all of it took its toll on her. He wouldn’t trade having been there for anything, but he couldn’t pretend it hadn’t fallen almost entirely on her. “Thank you, _cariad_. For our kids.” He called her that sometimes in private moments like this, meaning the endearment with all his heart. A thing his own father never called his mother, and it meant all the more for him to be different in that way too.

She lifted her head looked up at him, eyes soft and luminous in the lamplight. She traced the line of his jaw with her fingers, smiling gently at him. “My pleasure. You ever wonder if we made Bea on our wedding night?”

He had, sometimes. “We stayed pretty busy those first few weeks, gotta admit. But--I like to think so.” It seemed fitting if that was how it happened, all that waiting and hope rewarded like that, and no harm in imagining that to be true, so far as he saw. “Feels a lot like that tonight. Just us, the quiet here, got all the time we need.”, and it felt oddly right to think about it tonight, given that had been how it was three years ago, another quiet night all dreamy and slow, just the two of them lying there unclothed and unafraid and holding each other in tenderness rather than a blaze of passion.

She pushed herself to sit up, brushing her hair back from her face, then kissing him. “Well, cowboy, let’s make good use of it.” She took his hand in hers, pressing a kiss to his palm, then surprising him by guiding it to her breasts.

“Thought you didn’t want--” But even as he said it, he felt himself instinctively curving his hand to fit the shape of her, soft and yielding beneath his touch.

“We almost never had time before. And the few times we did, kids were young enough I was nursing constantly, so I was always sore or leaking or both. I ain’t right now. So...no kissing just yet, might get too strange,” she said, her eyes steady on his. He nodded, understanding. Too much like nursing a child, confusing her instincts. “And I’ll tell you if it gets to be too much. Wasn’t ever a matter of wanting. Cause I do. I miss it. You touching me like this.” 

She wanted to try, and he’d missed this too, so it was no hardship. Especially not feeling how she leaned into his touch, seeing her eyes sliding half-shut in pleasure at the slow stroke of his fingers.

Three years a husband, and so much more sweet than sour about it. The man he was before couldn’t have ever dreamed of having a life like this, and he wondered what the next three years would bring their way. But he’d wait to discover that. She was right. They had all night, and each other, and right now that was what mattered.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
Quite the wedding anniversary. Had a bit of an adventure in Banner helping the local lawman investigate some damn quack claiming to be a Spiritualist. Turns out he’s some idiot who probably read some traveler’s account of Indian herbs down near the Mexico border and decided to use them to bend people’s minds to pliability. Didn’t know how to use them right and at least one fella died for it.

Now I appreciate a good con more than most, but the truth is the only enjoyment came in playing a role and working with Sadie in outwitting him. The man himself only makes me tired and angry. No art to his scam, only carelessness and stupidity, and as I told Sadie, feeding off people’s grief. Making folk sick and killing them too.

I do wonder if it was Hosea I heard, for a moment, back in that wagon. Clearly no doing by Byers, the damn idiot, as I think he would have mouthed some general crap about dear Horatio Kilgore that could have fit anyone’s father. But it’d be like Hosea to sneak into a badly done scam only to mock it. He always was a dramatic bastard. ~~I still miss him.~~

 **Sketch of Seth Byers’ wagon** , captioned “The Wagon of the God of Dicks and Dumbasses”

 **Sketch of Sadie asleep under the quilt** , captioned “Married three years today. I love her even more than I did then, which seems impossible, but somehow it’s true.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A/N: "Marihuma" is one of the names reported (first written reference in 1905) before the popularization/standardization of "marijuana/marihuana" in the '20s and 30's.


	37. Minnewakan: Friendly Pursuits

The weeks passed, May yielding to June, and the breezes and vibrant green of the Canadian summer brought back memories of fine times in Oregon, Montana, and thereabouts, so different from the past few years in the desert of Nuevo Paraiso. Looking at Sadie sometimes, he had to think she recalled her own precious two summers in Pinetree Gulch. Though New Caledonia was gentler land than the stark, challenging beauty of the high mountains of Ambarino. Thick dark pine and spruce forests, especially to the north end of Spirit Lake, but towards the south, the trees interspersed with smaller ponds and lakes, then tailing off into the seemingly endless prairie of the west, made for a good land.

At least to his eyes--he could understand the Hehakaton grief for the home ripped away from them. They’d been bison hunters and peerless horse riders, and here they were expected to become farmers, fishermen, trappers, all things that were foreign to them, or else depend solely on the government’s condescending food supply, all the while probably muttering irritably about “those damn Indians” being “too lazy and feckless” to learn to fend for themselves. 

But they did the best they could with it. Learning from their eastern cousins who’d been here for decades, when Rains Fall was permitted to go visit their reserve to the northeast, or their chief, Gathering Clouds, coming to Minnewakan, when Frazier either wrote a pass or turned a blind eye. They got by, at least, and compared to when he’d seen the desperate look on Rains Fall’s face five years ago, there was a certain resignation to the inevitability to the future now, but there was a shine in his eyes, seeing his people settled, no longer pursued by the Army.

They did what they could, him and Sadie both, to pitch in and help out. Whether that was hunting, fishing, watching a whole gaggle of kids, running errands in Banner, or anything else, it felt good to be a part of something like this. Today it was building another cabin, and he was no carpenter, but the locals had knocked together their share of them in the past few years, plus Sadie’s experience there, having built that cabin with Jake up in the mountains, proved invaluable. He wasn’t a man too proud to follow her direction, after all, and she was sharp at it. It had been a well constructed cabin she and Jake made. If not for that overturned lantern, it would have stood fast against the hard winters easily.

Straddling a roof beam, up there with a hammer and nails fastening down support beams, the June midday sun beat down fiercely on them all, but they kept going at it. The songs sung by the folks of the tribe might be unfamiliar, but the happy mood of a community pitching in together, joined here by common purpose, felt good. Karen too had some experience with building, so she was enthusiastically pitching in near the sawhorses, busy holding one end of the saw while Red Shawl handled the other, and from the way the two of them were laughing, having a fine time of it.

He glanced over at Charles, giving him a bit of a grin as his friend reached for the rawhide pouch holding the nails, slung over one of the roof beams. “Quite a change from the old days, ain’t it?”

Charles gave him a brief, warm smile in return. “Sure is.”

“Things here seem pretty good. You’ve stayed, so you’re happy?”

Charles’ eyes rose to meet his. “Is that a question?”

It seemed a strange shift from back then, when it seemed like he was the one going out of his mind trying to keep everything within him contained so nobody would see what a complete mess he truly was, and there was Charles, calm and certain and capable and simply _good_ to the point he damn near radiated it. He could admit now that if he’d been looking--and he hadn’t--and had he had a prayer of measuring up to someone like that--and he didn’t--perhaps he could have ended up smitten with someone like that. Perhaps he had, in a way.

As was, he still felt left with the oddest sense that no, he hadn’t been in love with the man quite like that, but some feeling had existed, true as anything, even if a desire to share his bed hadn’t. Not quite worship, that heady mix of awe and love and fear of inevitably disappointing he’d had for Dutch all those years. He couldn’t quite put a name to it, but he’d felt it all the same for Charles, much the same as he’d felt for Eliza all those years ago, that fierce and hopeless admiration and respect and affection, the bitter shame of knowing himself for some sad, stunted, crooked thing cast in shadow compared to their sheer sunlit strength and goodness.

Things had changed. Now he was the one with something settled, and it was Charles who had that restless, frustrated sense in him. It hit him with something almost like vertigo to realize how the wheel had turned. He’d admired Charles, he’d envied John having a woman and a son. Wondered now if Charles looked at him the same way, seeing a dream that felt impossible. His letters to Chuparosa after Wears Great Medicine chose Paytah had that familiar sense of resigned melancholy, and he had to wonder if that had taken root and grown into something choking and poisonous. 

He met Charles’ gaze, reaching for another nail by feel. “What if it is? I’m allowed to hope you’re happy, right?”

Charles shrugged, voice going softer. “No need to worry. I do all right.”

“Ain’t what I asked.”

“Arthur, what’s with picking at this?”

He had a hard time even answering that to himself, but the more he looked at it, the more it became clear. Putting the nail back in the pouch, he slung the hammer off his belt, bracing his hands on the roof beam. “I lived a lot of years ‘doing all right’. Doing what I could for them I cared for, cause I thought there wasn’t nothing else. Couldn’t ever be. Not for me. So I stayed. Too scared to do otherwise. At least I knew I had a place with the gang. I lost chances for something different. Lost a girl I loved cause she chose a different life than mine.” He inhaled, held the breath for a moment, weighed the decision. No point in not saying it, and somehow, it got easier to say every time. “I had a son. Long time ago. I lost my best chance with him, even before he and his momma was killed by bandits, cause I was too scared to change for them. We was two dumb young fools who got reckless drunk, but we could have made something good of it, if I’d had the guts for it. If I’d...” 

He couldn’t help but glance down at the kids playing all together in the grass, seeing the bright gold of Bea and Mattie’s hair easily enough among the dark brown and black of the other children. Imagining Isaac’s ink-black hair, remembering the feel of it beneath his fingers as he helped scrub the boy down after he’d been playing in mud puddles after a rain shower, Isaac giggling the whole while. Seeing Danny there, and his olive skin and dark hair, sometimes for just an instant it was like looking at a ghost of Isaac until he saw the blue rather than grey eyes, how Danny’s hair didn’t curl like Isaac’s had. “She was like you, Eliza. Grew up in Tennessee. She had black, white, Indian blood too. Sometimes she didn’t feel like she had much place in this world either.” One of the few things she’d dared to confide in him, one long quiet winter night, reading together near the fireplace of that cabin. One of the things he’d understood well enough, given his own upbringing, and the world that seemed to not want him either. Immigrant, orphan, child of a criminal, raised by outlaws. 

He could see things now his scared young self couldn’t, so convinced that the way it had been with Mary, all overwhelming emotion that cost him all his damn sense, was how love had to be. He’d learned better. He’d spent a year and a half coming to know Sadie, coming to love her in ways that had little to do with romance or desire, before that shift happened to seeing her like that, and he could look back now and admit that same careful growth of respect and affection had been there with Eliza. Even more cautious, true, given what a terrible damage to trust they’d started off on, but he had to wonder if she’d let him keep coming around for more than Isaac’s sake. Why she hadn’t told him to leave and simply found another man as poor widowed Mrs. McCready. Had she been growing those feelings too over those four years, and been too naive and confused herself to truly know them for what they were? 

He thought it likely, now. She’d only been with one man before him, and that miserable specimen had whisked her off her feet with promises of romance and forever, took her away from Tennessee, and then left her behind in that ass-end-of-nowhere mining town when he was done with her. “I cared about her. I see that now. I’m pretty sure she cared about me. It wasn’t just about our boy. But I expect she was too scared to say something after I’d already refused to leave the gang, and I was too young and stupid. Couldn’t see leaving as anything but being disloyal to folks who’d saved my life. Couldn’t imagine I’d be enough for her either.”

Charles looked at him, dark eyes steady, nothing given away about those particular revelations from his expression, though there was a faint flicker of confusion. “Thank you for telling me. But why are you saying this, Arthur?”

He sighed, trying to explain it as best he could. “Cause ever since Wears--”

Though that attempt got interrupted by sudden hollers and calls, and he glanced down to see five men on their horses riding out from the pasture, circling the central post of the village and giving the chants and spine-tingling shouts and whoops he remembered echoing among the damp stone of Beaver Hollow as Rains Fall stood there in dejection, sounding again from that hill overlooking Cornwall Refinery. To judge from the paint on their ponies and the men themselves, and the bows and repeaters they carried, there was no other answer--they were mustering for war.

Charles exchanged a look with him, that look of mingled resignation and dread, and they both headed for the ladder down, scrambling there in a hurry. He suppressed a wince as he ended up with a hefty splinter jammed into his left palm, but shook it off.

Boots on the ground, he debated what the hell he could do in this situation, but as he instinctively took a step forward towards the display, feeling that sense of inevitability like trying to stop a boulder from rolling downhill but knowing he had to try, tired of stupid and senseless deaths, tired of a good man like Rains Fall left mourning, he saw one of them turn towards him, wheeling his horse with casual ease. “Are we men or have we become dogs?” Coyote Runs said with an air of disgust, raising his voice, and Arthur could sense everyone in the area paying close attention from the stillness of things. “Your people took everything from us, _wašícu_. Our chief, a great man, crawls on his belly for your kind. He sells our soul to the white man and calls it safety. And now Rains Fall brings you here among us. There’s _nothing_ that belongs to our people anymore. There’s nothing sacred. And I would rather die in battle than kill my soul like this.” A few calls of agreement came from the other mounted men.

He was about ready to speak up, to defend Rains Fall, when he felt a hard grip on his shoulder. “Be silent,” a voice hissed in his ear, not rudely, but firmly. “You won’t help this.” The hand squeezed once, then let go, and Paytah strode past him, heading for Coyote Runs. He raised his own voice. “You know me, Coyote Runs. I rode to war five years ago. I rode beside Eagle Flies, angry in my heart like him. Your words now, same as mine then. Rains Fall rode against the Bluecoats as a young man, again and again. There’s no beating the _wašícu_. We know it. It’s a mosquito biting a bison. We attacked then thinking we was doing right. The soldiers killed men who had nothing to do with it. Raped women. Tried to take the medicine our people needed. Any raids you make just cost what’s left of us. Your anger leads you into foolishness. Cost you Bright Waters’ trust already. It’ll cost lives if you keep it up.” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder back towards Arthur. “As for him, he and his wife rode beside us in battle. They’re like Lone Wolf. They ask nothing of us.”

Coyote Runs scowled, and Arthur could sense the impotent rage of a cornered man who now had no choice but to back down with any grace possible. “Maybe we should name you ‘Ghost Heart’, not ‘Fire Heart’. Seems you’re turning white.”

At that, Wears Great Medicine strode forward, standing barely three feet from the front hooves of Coyote Runs’ chestnut pony, completely fearless at staring him down. “You shamed yourself by being unfaithful to your wife. You shame yourself even more riding around spouting this crap and pretending it’s being a warrior. You’re a boy, Coyote Runs. Learn to talk like a man. To act like a man. Then people will listen to you.”

Coyote Runs sneered down at her. “There’s no way to _be_ a Hehekaton man anymore. Just ghost-men.” But he jerked the horse’s reins around sharply, heading back to the herd, and the other men followed.

He saw Wears Great Medicine going to Paytah, and he gave her a small smile, a touch on her arm. Little things he recognized himself, those tiny shows of affection and trust that had become so very ordinary to him. Though when he looked over at Charles, he saw that distant look, like to look at the two of them, the easy love between them, would be staring into the sun. “Charles…” He felt like he hadn’t understood how deep the wound ran until now. It wasn’t lingering feeling for the woman who’d given her heart to another man, feeling unreasonably resentful of her, so much as the pain of believing he’d been foolish to ever believe in the first place. The unlucky combination of feeling unable to belong anywhere else, and unable to hope for love by anyone else. God, didn’t he understand that, and how much it had poisoned his own life for so many years. At least he’d never had to stay and watch Mary married to someone else, and she hadn’t even loved Gerald Linton the way Wears Great Medicine obviously did her husband. It wasn’t her so much as seeing something so longed for, and the wistful bleak sorrow of _That kind of happiness can never be mine._

At that, Charles strode off, and Arthur would have gone after him, but Paytah turned to him, purposefulness in his gaze and his gesture to Arthur. “Can we talk?”

No good way to refuse, especially given he’d been part of Coyote Runs’ particular war whip-up screed. “Sure.” He followed Paytah to his cabin, and the other man shut the door behind them, gesturing him to a seat at the table with a casual wave. He then sat opposite Arthur, pouring a cup of coffee from the percolator on the iron stove, and shoving a mug of it across the table.

He decided at this point he could speak up, at least to ask a question. “Should Sadie and me be heading out? I got no wish to make things worse for your people.”

Paytah took a sip of his own coffee, eyeing Arthur over the rim of his tin mug, then took a long moment after swallowing to answer. “I suppose you’re about as used to feeling unwanted as the tribe is.”

He tried to not take it as an insult. “I told Eagle Flies that years ago. Government was no fonder of my kind than yours.”

“Yes, but Rains Fall knows there’s nowhere left to run. This is the place we have now. For good or bad. So we gotta stand our ground and make it work.”

“You’re coming to a point here, I imagine. If there’s something I can do for you, name it. I owe you. Said as such to Rains Fall.”

Paytah sighed, putting his mug down on the pine table, scrubbed clean until the wood glowed with a soft golden hue. “It’s no secret here at Minnewakan. Rains Fall favors Lone Wolf--Charles. And you.” He held up a hand to keep Arthur silent. “He’s had a hard life. Marrying Stands Fast made him smile again. He’s smiled even more this summer. Your being here makes him happy.”

So here was the heir, seemingly jealous of not being loved. He suppressed an instinctive cringe, remembering those ugly feelings he’d had in the first months of John being there, and what depths of furious self-destruction he’d thrown himself into because of them, how he’d blighted things with Mary, made such a mistake with Eliza, in his moping and anger. “I ain’t a threat.”

“I know that. I don’t resent you,” Paytah said calmly. “Rains Fall, he’s smart enough to separate what’s best for our people from himself. And I know why he wants me to take over after he’s gone, but he don’t want to see me as a son.” His dark eyes met Arthur’s. “My parents are alive yet. He wouldn’t take me from my father. Besides, I was too close to Eagle Flies. We were like brothers. The pain, it’s too much. So as my chief, he needs me. He respects me enough to leave me, and my wife, the responsibility of leading this tribe when he’s gone. But as a man, his heart needs sons, against the two that were taken from him. Eagle Flies was both his son and his heir, and it was too much for them both. It needs to be less complicated now. And I suppose maybe it’s easier to love men who fight for our people, but don’t have Hehakaton blood. Whose own parents he never know, and who don’t look like his dead boys. I care about Rains Fall. He’s suffered a lot for us. He deserves some happiness. If you and Charles give him that, so be it.” 

“I don’t know that he sees me like--” He shook his head. “Never mind. Maybe he does.” He cleared the notion out quickly enough. Hosea had never been much of a man for saying things openly either, but it had been there, silent actions and affection. It meant a hell of a lot more than Dutch’s constant _son_ and _my boy_ , all gilded lies. “It ain’t a problem for you, so you say. What about the tribe?”

Paytah gave a slight grin. “Smart man. Charles--he’s got Kiowa blood, and colored men don’t have it easy either. Plus he’s been here since we left Ambarino. You? You’re white. You show up again this year after four and a half years away. You’re going to leave again in a few months. You’re a bigger threat. They worry that maybe you’ll use Rains Fall’s love for you to steer him. Deliberately or not, who knows.” He leaned over the table a bit, not in intimidation, but in a strange sort of intimacy, his voice going softer, almost imploring. “So I’ll ask you this. Whether he formally names you _hunka_ or not, treat him with honor, and make an old man happy. Be his son, but don’t try to be a _chief’s_ son and use your voice to speak for the tribe. You’re his chosen kin, you’ve proven yourself our friend, but you aren’t Hehakaton. You don’t get to decide our ways. Charles, I think, understands that balance already. But it’s very easy--no offense meant--for a white man to walk in and assume he knows best.”

He sat on that for a little bit, so as to not seem too defensive or glib about it. But in a way, he was grateful to Paytah for laying it out so openly like that, taking the risk of offending rather than letting resentment flare up, either in him or in others. He could see places where he could make suggestions about things, however well-intended, that could come across badly, so he hadn’t, and now he was thankful for that. “Look. I ain’t here to try to tell any of you how it should be. You got little enough of your own left to you. What help I can give that you want, I will. But these are Rains Fall’s people. Not my place to try to lead them, or him.” He shook his head, unable to help a wry smile. “Shit, I got enough trouble just trying to figure out where things is going with my own family right now.” 

Paytah rewarded him for that with a hearty laugh. “Quite a woman, your wife.”

That wasn’t what he’d meant, given he’d let slip too much the uncertainty of the future, but he’d let it stay seeming like a tongue-in-cheek joke. “Same to you, I’d say.”

He watched Paytah’s lips curve up in an amused smile. “Charles seems to have taken up with a lively one himself.”

Now he ended up staring in earnest, taken aback. “Wait, what?” Had he totally misread things?

“Your sister.”

“Charles and Karen?” 

“Laughing Woman caught them riding back from him giving her a hunting lesson last week. Said when they saw her, they got that guilty look like two kids caught out behind her parents’ lodge.”

That took a little translating, but he suspected it amounted to two kids surprised on their way back from kissing and feverishly touching each other out behind the barn. Or maybe in a hayloft. Thank God Francis Gillis had never caught him and Mary like that. Now he couldn’t help but start laughing himself, shaking his head. “Well, I’ll be damned.”

So Charles’ brooding was maybe slightly different from what he’d thought. Not the dull ache of absence of any brightness in the future like he’d thought, but that acute, gnawing pain of not wanting to feel that way, not wanting to hope from that fear of being rejected and disappointed again. No wonder he’d given Arthur a bit of a strange look when he’d tried to launch into that attempted explanation that if he was unhappy here, he didn’t need to stay only out of forlorn resignation that nowhere else would have him.

Or was it even true? Was he hurrying to make Charles too much like him in this? Maybe Charles was just figuring out what to do about Karen, acting like a normal grown man in his thirties looking at the situation with mature patience and prudence, rather than youthful recklessness, or all of Arthur’s hesitant anxious foolishness at that.

On reflection, he thought probably it might have gone better for him to have not said anything at all. Charles’ confused expression at him talking about Isaac and Eliza said plenty. He hadn’t expected some kind of personal revelation, because there was no hook to hang it upon that made sense to him. Shit. Well, that made things awkward now. 

Though in some ways he couldn’t regret having said it for its own sake. Talking about it lessened the pain, and turned it from a guilty secret to a past grief besides. He still felt some shame in how he’d handled things back then, of course, but over the past few years, he’d come to see it was a foolish mistake he could never rectify, but it wasn’t the mark of damnation he’d made it into for so long. 

The love for Isaac, and the love he’d had to admit in recent years he’d had for Eliza, would always be mingled with regret and loss. But he had to believe it was better, even so, to have let it out again into the light of day rather than leaving it buried beneath the ground with them. It was a private pain he didn’t have to share with the world, but towards those he trusted and cared for, he no longer felt the burden of a need for carrying it silently and alone.

“It’d be good for him to settle down with a woman of his own,” Paytah said, eyeing Arthur. He shrugged, a little awkwardly. “It’s hard being alone. I know he, uh, sees women in Banner sometimes. He grew up among white ways for a long time, so things are different for him.”

“Wasn’t my way,” he felt the need to say defensively. “But you ain’t wrong, fine, plenty of fellas do see it like that.” He’d known Charles was one of them. He’d looked plenty cozy with that woman in Valentine, Anastasia’s friend--he’d never caught her name. Arthur had seen him coming down from the saloon’s upstairs in St. Denis once, maybe a week before the bank robbery, the dark-haired gal he’d clearly been with giving him a slow, knowing caress on the shoulder as she sent him on his way, laughing and telling him to come see her again. He’d clearly enjoyed the ladies, and they’d favored him just as obviously.

He’d gotten the sense things in the tribe were different. It wasn’t the same as the ways he knew, where a woman was a wife or a whore and nothing in between, and men were expected to rut like damn brainless fools constantly. Sex might be fun, it was also sacred. So they held their men to the same standard of continence, and while he suspected fooling around before marriage happened often enough, given they didn’t have a big wedding ceremony, there likely would be some stern looks if two people kept dancing around commitment for too long while obviously sleeping together. Adultery, as he’d seen with Coyote Runs, was a big transgression.

He couldn’t relate to it, not having been inclined that way himself. The Hehakaton way actually fit far more naturally for him compared to that miserable push to go fuck women when he’d felt but awkwardness about it. But not much room there for a bachelor of thirty-five looking for some comfort and to scratch an itch casually. No wonder Charles took care of that business in Banner. “You want me to, uh, say something to him?” he asked awkwardly.

“No, it’s fine,” Paytah said, equally flustered for a moment. “Unless you feel you need to, her being your sister and all. Charles is--well, he’s one of us, yes, but also not, so I wouldn’t expect him to adhere entirely to our ways. So long as it’s not causing trouble...”

Somehow it was good to see the man wrongfooted himself, uncertain of how to handle it. “She’s my sister, but she makes her own choices. They’re two grown folk,” he said, meeting Paytah’s gaze with a calm nod. “She’s been widowed too. Let’s see how they figure it out themselves before we go rushing in pushing them around.” Better to not meddle unless it was needed.

Paytah acknowledged that with a nod of his own. “So be it.” He gave Arthur a genuine, warm smile. “I can see why he likes you. The way you see things, what you value, there’s a lot about you that’s like us.”

He felt himself blushing a bit at the compliment. “Thank you. Um. _Philámayaye_.” He’d learned that quickly after coming here. The years in Mexico had rubbed off on him and Sadie both. The sense of it being rude to dwell too long among people and not make any effort to learn their language clung too close.

Heading back out into the sunshine, he saw Bea heading for him as fast as her little legs could carry her, attaching herself to his own legs like a possum on a tree branch. “Hi! Hi! Wanna play!” 

Looking down at her broad grin and bright eyes, he glanced over towards the cabin and the men at work there, and Stands Fast saw it and laughed, beckoning him over towards the rowdy gaggle of children playing in the grass. “Come over a minute.” 

Scooping Bea up, he brought her back to the other kids, spotting Mattie’s bright grin at seeing him there. Sitting down in the grass, he kept Bea on his lap. “She behaving herself?” he asked Stands Fast, only half joking.

“She’s fine,” she assured him, and gave him a smile. “The cabin will be fine without you for a few minutes. This here,” she reached out and touched Two Hawks’ hair, her gnarled fingers gentle as she ruffled it fondly, “is what matters most.”

He couldn’t help but smile a bit in return. “They’re the best things I got in my life,” he answered her quietly. The warmth in her expression at that told him he’d given not only the true answer, but the right one in her eyes. But then, he’d seen these people cherished their kids so much, loving them fiercely and openly. 

Bea lasted a few minutes before wriggling her way loose of his arm around her and pleading, “Daddy wanna play pony?” Though if he did it for her, it didn’t seem fair to deny everyone else, so he ended up roped into being down on hands and knees, acting a pony for any number of the kids, riding on his back and shrieking with glee.

His knees gave a couple twinges of protest as he finally got up and dusted off his knees and hands, reminding him he wasn’t twenty-five anymore. Maybe a man just shy of forty-one maybe shouldn’t be romping in the grass like that anyway, in full view of everyone. It might be considered unseemly. But somehow that concern didn’t seem to matter. All that did matter was those sounds of delight, and the smiles. And when he looked over towards the others there, the looks they gave him were fond, amused, not judging in some way.

Giving Mattie a quick kiss and leaving him to happily gnaw on the buckskin doll Stands Fast had given him, he spotted Charles headed towards the commissary. Hurrying his step a bit to catch up, he dusted off his hands one more time, noting the grass stains, and said, “Cabin still coming along all right?”

Charles just shook his head and gave a low chuckling grunt. “Still feeling guilty if you’re not busy, I see.” 

He felt the heat rising in his cheeks at that. “I want to help, that’s all,” and he heard the sharp edge of defensiveness in his tone. “What’s so wrong about that?”

“At least you ain’t running yourself into the ground,” Charles replied, pausing in his walk. “That’s good. Look, we appreciate the help, but no need for hurting yourself by it.”

 _We_ , he’d said, obviously including himself. That answered one thing for certain. “All right, Sadie’s been after me enough about it, maybe you ain’t wrong.” He glanced over at Charles, trying to think how best to say it without making things even stranger than they had been. “I misjudged some stuff with you, I’d say. I just--I been happy these last years. Real happy.”

“I saw that. You and Sadie, and how you both are with your children.” Charles gave one of those rare, broad smiles of his. “Should have figured that from how you was with Jack. Though--if you lost a boy of your own, and a woman, that makes more sense of things. Thank you for telling me.” 

He nodded, glad with that quiet acknowledgment that Charles wasn’t going to make it into something odd between them. “You’re a good man, Charles. I want you knowing you got a right to be happy too. That’s all.”

Charles gave him another of those sidelong looks as if wondering whether there was something else to be said. Arthur gave him a half-shrug. Like Karen had said way back in Valentine, she didn’t like to be rescued. If she needed it eventually, so be it, but she was tough enough to take care of herself, and besides, the notion of warning Charles to be good to her felt tired. If he trusted the man enough to have called him brother even then, and he trusted Karen’s judgment as a grown woman, there was no need for posturing bullshit.

Though admittedly if Charles ever somehow hurt Karen, no question whose side he would be on.

He nodded towards the commissary door. “You picking up, or checking in?”

“Checking in,” Charles answered. “Seeing what’s low on the meat or plant supply--then I was planning on heading out. You want to come with me?”

He looked back over his shoulder, back towards Stands Fast and the kids. Sadie, Bright Waters, and Karen were on their way to town to pick up Felipe, plus the usual mail and supply run. They were in good hands. It was fine. “Sure. Just let me go get my stuff.” He gave Charles a wry grin. “See if you still got more bow hunting pointers for me yet.” Hearing Charles’ low, rich chuckle at that, he headed back towards his and Sadie’s cabin.

~~~~~~~~~

Fine sunny day that it was, it made for a nice drive towards Banner. They’d had to go to Frank Frazier’s wood-framed house between the Minnewakan and Rainbow Lake reservations first, which was a pain in the ass in and of itself since that was a two hour journey north before heading back south to Banner. Frazier himself was a burly man in his forties, dusty-colored hair and mustache. He invited them into his office, crammed with books and papers, hadn’t asked more than cursory questions, and hadn’t asked why Bright Waters needed to go along with Sadie and Karen already going. Apparently he sympathized with her need to get the hell off the reserve occasionally. Scribbling out the pass, he glanced up at them with dark eyes and commented mildly, “You lot be careful on the roads, now. Been hearing from Chief Crying Loon rumors of a wendigo.”

“Wendigo?” Karen asked, glancing at Bright Waters. The woman gave a shrug, her brows puckered in confusion. 

Frazier smiled slightly beneath that drooping mustache. “It’s Wawashkeshi, not Hehakaton. They’re the other tribe I deal with as agent in these parts. The wendigo, they say it’s an evil cannibal spirit. Always hungry.” He shrugged slightly himself, a graceful gesture. “Maybe they ran across some corpse a bear had ravaged--”

“We ain’t so stupid as that, Mr. Frazier,” Bright Waters spoke up, her tone mild but her words firm all the same. “Nor are our neighbors the Wawashkeshi, I imagine.”

He looked at her, and a look of chagrin crossed his face. “Of course. My apologies, Bright Waters. In any case, there’s some unease. The pass, though, what’s your white name again, as it’s gotta be made out under that?”

“Berenice Strong Shield,” she supplied neatly, and Frazier nodded, scribbling that on the pass. He handed it to her, and Sadie spied something like a half-dozen other passes in a neat stack with it. Bright Waters nodded at that, tucking the written one in her pocket, and then the others away in her satchel.

“You ladies have a fine day now,” Frazier called.

Seated back on the wagon, Karen in the back and Bright Waters beside her, Karen finally asked, “Strong Shield--that your father’s name?” 

Bright Waters nodded. “It was.” She made a face, nose crinkling in annoyed disgust. “Good thing I didn’t marry yet in a way the government recognized. No preacher around until fall for marrying and burying. Seems that was for the best, huh? Better to be Berenice Strong Shield than Berenice Coyote Runs.”

“We all make some bad choices about men,” Karen said dryly, with a self-conscious laugh. “Well, except Sadie, it seems. She’s picked good ones twice now.”

Feeling herself the butt of the joke, snapping the reins more briskly to hide the spike of flustered irritation, she couldn’t help but say, “What, that’s a bad thing?”

“Not a bit,” Karen said, and Sadie felt a hand on her shoulder, a pat of reassurance.

“You’ll find someone, both of you,” she said, hating that awkward sounding platitude, but knowing it was all she had to offer. “You’re good women.”

“Maybe,” Bright Waters said. “But for right now, I’m gonna enjoy not dealing with a man’s farts and dirty socks.”

The three of them cracked up at that, and that set a good mood as they got underway to Banner, making good time despite the northern detour. “So he writes you blank passes, Mr. Frazier?” Sadie asked. “Don’t gotta answer that if you don’t want.”

“It’s fine. He usually gives me, my mother, or my stepfather some. He trusts they’ll get to Rains Fall and be used smart in situations that need it, by people who won’t tell stories about it.” She smiled in a wry way, tipping her head back and breathing in deep, eyes closed in the summer sunshine. “Normally no passes for a nice journey like this, just cause. So thank you for having me along.”

“Sure,” Sadie said, sensing it was best to not dig up the whole messy wound of it by talking too much about the situation, and simply acknowledging it and moving on. “Glad to have you with.”

“This doctor coming here, he knows what he’s getting into by moving up here?”

“He does. He’s lived in some rough situations in Mexico, especially the last few years. Dealt with TB patients for years. Lost his wife to TB, long time ago. He’s a good doctor, good man too.” She and Arthur both had been happy to get Felipe’s telegram last time they were in town, letting them know he’d be coming north. Maybe they couldn’t do much to fix things for the Hehakaton, but getting a doctor for the area, and one who’d be kind to Indians, felt like something.

“He’s Mexican,” Karen pointed out, “which means he may not want to live in Banner anyway. A lot of white folk ain’t gonna be nothing nice to him either, so he’ll sympathize with what’s going on.” 

Bright Waters nodded at that. Sadie held up the reins. “You wanna drive? Saw you riding a time or two--you’re good with horses.”

“Maybe our days of living free are gone,” Bright Waters answered, reaching for the reins, and giving a mischievous grin, “but bet we can still outride just about any of you.”

“I ain’t fool enough to take that bet,” Sadie said, sitting back against the back of the wagon seat with a laugh. 

She proved a deft hand with the wagon almost immediately, and the rest of the drive to Banner went by peacefully enough. Not much to pick up in the way of mail and supplies, though she noted a letter from Pedro and Juanita down in Oaxaca, and another from Tilly, which excited her well enough. But mostly she focused on the familiar figure, slightly stoop-shouldered, waiting on the train platform. “Felipe,” she said, heading towards him, unable to help a grin. “Real good to see you.”

“Arthur?” he asked, seeing Karen and Bright Waters behind her.

“Stayed back on the reserve. Building a cabin, at that.” Likely to be Felipe’s office, as it were, from what she understood. “You got a lot of supplies?” She leaned in, unable to help a dramatic stage whisper, “Brung the Cactus with you, did you? Arthur’s gonna be thrilled.”

“Hoping I have very little use, but I brought it in case, yes, along with the rest of the supplies from my old Chuparosa office.” Felipe grinned at her. “Tell Arthur he can’t wreck the machine just out of irritability.”

“He won’t, he’s only gonna stay at polite nodding distance. Like an old flame you don’t wanna acknowledge no more,” she said with a laugh. “All right, you got further business here in town, or would you as soon head out?”

“I’ve been here a couple of hours, so I’ve had a bit of a look around.”

“Sorry about that,” Bright Waters piped up. “That was me needing a pass to leave the reserve, and the Indian agent is a bit out of the way.” She stepped forward, offering him a hand to shake. “The government records call me Berenice Strong Shield. You’d best know that--any treatments you do will likely have to be reported with our _wašícu_ names for them to send you any supplies. My real name, though, is Bright Waters.” 

Felipe looked at her, one eyebrow cocked in confusion. “ _Wašícu_?”

“ _Gringo_ ,” Sadie said, tongue-in-cheek. Seemed white people had a habit of making a poor enough impression on the locals to have their descriptor become something of an epithet. 

“Ah,” Felipe acknowledged with a nod, reaching out and taking Bright Waters’ hand to shake it. “Then I’m very pleased to meet you, Miss--Waters?”

“Bright Waters is actually her full name,” Karen told him, but kindly. She clapped Felipe on the shoulder. “You’re a smart fella from what I saw. You’ll catch on soon enough.”

“When I think about it,” Felipe said, “maybe it’s best I take inventory before leaving. You said the reserve is a couple of hours at least? I’m used to having mail and telegraph right down the street, I admit.” He looked at Bright Waters. “Would you mind sitting down with me a while and going through a list of things with me, let me know if it’s an issue you’ve seen among your people? That way if I haven’t got it with me I can get it ordered now while I’m still here and have it in a week or two.”

“She’s the chief’s stepdaughter,” Sadie told him. “She’d know.”

“Of course,” Bright Waters said, smoothing down her red calico skirt and gesturing Felipe to a wrought-iron bench on the station platform. Felipe dug in his pocket for a well-folded and worn list he’d obviously consulted more than once on the journey from Nuevo Paraiso, unfolding it as he went.

“We’ll get your stuff loaded, meantime,” Karen called towards their retreating backs.

Getting Nye to hire a couple of strong backs to help lug crates and the like, and hearing the distinct clicking of glass in one as one of the young men bobbled it a bit, Sadie barked, “Jesus, be careful, will you? That’s important stuff!” For it to have made it all the way from Mexico and get messed up here seemed ridiculous.

“Yes ma’am,” he mumbled.

She went and grabbed a smaller box, labels of things she didn’t even pretend to understand, but so long as Felipe made sense of it, that was what mattered. Gentling her tone, she called, “Make sure you leave room in the back. We got two folk riding there on the way, all right?”

She looked over at Karen, lugging her own box. “Think this one’s all heavy books,” Karen grunted. “Should have grabbed something lighter.”

She clicked her tongue in sympathy at that. “Maybe you can get Charles to rub them shoulders tonight.”

Karen shot her a look of surprise, green eyes wide. “Ain’t sure what you--”

She resisted the urge to roll her eyes, even as she couldn’t help but smile, remembering those days herself with Jake. “You two come back from hunting a few days ago with three grouse and a fat badger, sure, but his shirt was missing two buttons his kerchief weren’t covering entirely,” Sadie said dryly. “Pay me the compliment of not assuming me for a fool, Karen. Besides, why shouldn’t I know? Ain’t like I’d be mad that you got a fella to love.”

Karen shook her head, wisps of blond hair curling out of her own braid. “Ain’t like that.”

“Oh, he got stung by a bee and you was helping him, was that it?” 

“No, I mean we ain’t lovey-dovey.” Karen set down the crate with a heavy thump. Eyeing their hired hands, Sadie wasn’t surprised her next words were in Spanish. “Yeah, we’ve been screwing. We’re having a good time together, that’s all. Nothing complicated.”

That surprised her a bit. She tried to think how to put it delicately. “That wise? I remember how it was with Sean--” She hadn’t wanted to hear, but she’d heard Karen and Sean in the tent that night at Horseshoe Overlook. Exchanged an awkward glance with Arthur, another accidental voyeur, but Karen’s crying had hit something of a raw nerve within her in particular, given she’d cried the second night of her ordeal, when the O’Driscolls hauled her back up from the cellar, the shocked daze wore off, and the nightmare of Jake’s death and their plans for her became all too real again.

Pausing in the walk back to the crates, Karen leaned against the blue-painted wall of the train station. “Look. Sean was sweet, in his way. But we wasn’t ever gonna be something. I--I hurt myself a lot trying to get some man to love me, cause world says there ain’t no other way for a woman to be. Truth it, I ain’t like you. I _like_ a good fuck.”

“What you mean by that? I like it plenty myself,” she protested, though she felt herself blushing furiously. “You think me and Arthur spend them nights you watched the kids _playing dominoes_?” She couldn't help but be grateful that Karen had kept up with it every couple of weeks to give them a night along.

“No, you both look properly wore out the next morning,” Karen said with a snicker. "Man knows how to leave you well satisfied." Sadie didn’t have further to blush, or she’d maybe have done it, momentarily remembering the last night alone they'd had, the roguish grin on Arthur's face and the sparkle in his eyes as he looked up at her, the gentle teasing kisses he pressed to her inner thighs and the faint pleasant scratch of his beard, before settling down to business. “Lived with you two the last few years too, don’t forget. Thing is, I mean, you and Arthur, it’s just the one way. You gotta love the person you’re bedding, or you just don’t want to bother with it.” She raised an eyebrow. “You gonna claim otherwise?”

“Can’t argue that,” she acknowledged. “Been like that with both Jake and Arthur.” She knew full well it was like that for Arthur too. He’d been pretty frank that he’d been put off by his near-forced experiences with saloon girls courtesy of Dutch. It wasn’t only that paralyzing guilt about Eliza--and the love she now knew he’d had for a dead woman, even if he hadn’t admitted it to himself--that kept him celibate all those years. He’d been waiting for love, even as he expected he would never deserve or have it.

“Ain’t like that for me. Or Charles. Love’s fine enough, but we’re just two friends enjoying each other’s company, in a bed as well as out of it, all right? He don’t judge me for being a woman wanting that. Don’t treat me like I’m a floozy, especially with knowing how Danny came about. It’s been...real nice. Just having fun with a man, without worrying about folk will think, or whether he’s gonna make me _respectable_ with a wedding ring. Nice for him too, I think, having a woman there he don’t gotta pay, who he can talk to and eat dinner with and all that. He’s real good to Danny too.”

She forebore from saying that sounded sort of like love to her, even if it wasn’t some grand, overwhelming storybook passion, and that she and Arthur had been pretty damn insistent in saying they were only friends for so long, even if they hadn’t been having sex at that point. Maybe Karen was right. Maybe it was that simple. Maybe a few months of quiet, uncomplicated joy was what they both needed, and it didn’t need to be more than that. She could never have let Arthur go after letting him into her heart and soul so much, but maybe that tie wasn’t there between Charles and Karen. “You both been lonely, I expect. What matters is he treats you right and you’re happy.”

“Yeah.” Karen managed an almost shy smile. “We talk. It’s easier being with someone who was there during the gang days. I expect you know that too.” Sadie nodded at that. “He’s the best man I’ve ever had, and I don’t just mean the things he can do to me, all right?”

She laughed at that. “If you ain’t gotta train him there’s more to the business than humping away, that’s a good thing.” Arthur might have been fairly inexperienced, but even he’d known that, and the sheer curiosity and eagerness to learn had been somehow sweet and erotic both. She reached out, put a hand on Karen’s arm. “Look. It was real kind, what you done for Arthur and me. There comes a point a quick roll around in the grass, or being in the dark keeping a hand over your mouth so you don’t wake a kid, gets frustrating. Let Arthur and me take Danny tonight, all right?” She figured Karen and Charles deserved the same opportunity for leisure, lamplight, and privacy, now that she knew what was what about the situation. Arthur wouldn’t mind, given how much he adored Danny. Bea might either sulk or be delighted, depending on whether she saw Danny as a rival or a best friend today, but she’d get by. She suspected Arthur didn’t know what was going on between their two friends, but fine, she could fill him in quickly enough.

Karen gave her a quick one-armed hug at that, her sudden excitement obvious in the force of it. “That’d be real fine. Thank you, Sadie.” Heading for the crate pile again, she grabbed another one, just as Felipe came up. “You got more stuff to get, Felipe?”

“I’ll wire an order for a few more things, yes,” he replied. He gestured towards Bright Waters, coming towards them as well. “She’s keen to learn the business, so it seems I’ve got at least one nurse in training.” Sadie could hear the enthusiasm in his voice at the idea, see the boyish sparkle in his hazel eyes at it. He’d fought so hard for the TB ward at Las Hermanas and seeing it taken from him as she had, knowing how devastated he’d been to see all that work carelessly discarded and the TB patients he’d cared for resigned to little more than imprisonment until their either died or somehow got better, it was a good thing to see that liveliness there given another cause that excited him. When they’d bid him farewell in January to head to MacFarlane’s, he’d been a dull shadow of himself, and if he were a different man, she’d have worried about him around the tequila. 

“Well, how about that.” She grinned at Bright Waters. “Found a cause of your own, have you?”

She shrugged, giving a sheepish smile. “The entire tribe knows Wears Great Medicine and Paytah are gonna lead us after my mother and Rains Fall are gone. So I need my own path, don’t I?”

She’d been strong enough to kick out her cheating husband, and admit he was a youthful mistake. Strong enough now to try to find her own way to save and protect her people. Wears Great Medicine might be tapped as a leader, and Sadie couldn’t argue with that choice given what she’d seen of the other woman’s wisdom and patience. But like she’d seen in the gang, there was more than one kind of strength, more than one kind of support that held up a whole community. “You do.” She patted Bright Waters on the shoulder. “You’re gonna learn from the best, at that. He goes to some big medical conference every year to know the latest stuff they got going in medicine. Them things nobody else was much doing yet, that’s what saved Arthur’s life.” Bright Waters had been there in 1899. She’d seen the nearly-dead man Sadie had brought to the reservation, so she as much as anyone was aware how hard a fight it had been to heal him. 

Finishing the wagon loading, she paid off the hired hands, and swung up into the seat. “Another plus, Felipe,” she called to him, settled in the back with Bright Waters, already having easily located the exact book he wanted--the man was meticulous as hell--and sitting down to discuss it with her. “Real quiet here compared to Del Lobos back h--” She caught herself. Chuparosa wasn’t much home anymore, was it? She and Arthur would have to figure out where they went next, but it seemed a return to Mexico wasn’t in the cards. They could likely get one of their friends in town to pack the few essentials and keepsakes they hadn’t brought with them, and get it shipped to wherever they ended up, but the furniture and the house, perhaps it was best they prepare to sell that already. They could use the money, after all.

More time to worry about that later, though she had to admit, they’d have to face and answer that question soon enough. It was near the end of June. October, their planned departure, would be here before they knew it, and they had to know what they were doing and where they were going. Problem was, she felt no more able to answer that question than she had been two months ago on the train north. So many partial possibilities--bounty hunting, Arthur joining the Mounties, trying to pick up seasonal work all around the year. Even a careful offer from Stands Fast, presumably with Rains Fall’s backing, for them to stay in Minnewakan. But nothing that truly fit well enough to solve the problem. She was thirty-six now. She’d thought Chuparosa would last, just like she’d thought Pinetree Gulch would last, just like she’d been determined to make Tumbleweed work, and Jesus, she was _tired_ of bad government and nasty-tempered bandits giving her little choice but to abandon yet another home turned inhospitable and unsupportable. She was getting too old for it. She wanted something solid and real, and preferably damn soon. The way things were going, she could only hope it didn’t come to a situation where they’d be past fifty and still living half like vagrants. Besides, there was Karen to think about too. If she and Charles were planning on a simple friendly liaison for the summer, she and Danny still had to figure into the equation too.

Caught up in those thoughts, she managed small talk with the others all the way back to the reserve, happy as anything to see Felipe again, but realizing she wasn’t like him. He had skills that would be prized, even if people might be jackasses about his being Mexican. Her? Farmers and hunters were a dime a dozen, and well, the less said about where she’d acquired killer instincts to fight a battle and be able to shoot a bad man down, the better. More and more, it felt like being caught in a net, flailing desperately, and no good way out. 

Getting back to the reserve, getting Felipe’s supplies temporarily unloaded into Many Winters’ commissary building, where he’d have a crowded corner until the infirmary was finished, she found Arthur was out with Charles, hunting.

She busied herself with the kids for the rest of the afternoon, telling the whole crowd of them stories, and that lifted her spirits greatly. The two of them came back as dusk was falling, and after Arthur turned in the kills to Many Winters and dealt with Buell, he found her, giving her a quick kiss. From the smell of him, he’d cleaned up any blood out in the lake or one of the ponds or streams in the air. Nice to be able to carry soap in a saddlebag for that while hunting, a luxury they hadn’t had in the desert. “Think Felipe will settle in all right?”

“I think so.” She kissed him back. “I told Karen we’d take Danny tonight, by the way. Karen and Charles need some time alone.”

“That so?” 

She knew that tone, too studiedly casual and even. She nudged him in the ribs. “You knew.”

“Paytah told me this afternoon. So, what,” his voice took on a teasing edge, “we need to be ready for our Mrs. Jones to become Mrs. Smith?”

“Not exactly. They’re agreeably passing time as friends, that’s all.” She gave a swift shrug. “Look, it might not be our way, but it works for them.” 

“All right, didn’t know it was like that, but I ain’t judging.” He quipped, now the humor obvious in his voice, “After all, I weren’t the one raised in the orbit of a preacher, miss. Well off the beaten society path is about all I knew.” He caught her hand in his. “I thought for a while if that’s what you wanted from me, I could be all right with it.”

She had to give a gentle snort of amusement at that, rubbing her thumb along the band of his wedding ring, feeling the warm metal beneath her touch. “Honey, you was always gonna need more than that to be happy. So did I.” Though she had to wonder if not for the O’Driscolls giving her such caution and fear, if she might not have tried to convince herself the comfort of a man in her bed was acceptable, so long as he didn’t replace Jake in her heart. She’d never had to find out, given she’d fallen in love with Arthur before the desire fully came back, but she could suspect all the same. The way she’d restlessly woken some nights, knowing she couldn’t reach out to the man beside her, said plenty. “We’d have hurt each other by it, once the love was in the picture.” Unable to risk saying they wanted more than that, they’d have been stuck just where they’d been, but even more confused with the physical intimacy in the picture besides. 

“Sure. But we done all right, in the end.” He put an arm around her shoulders, a familiar and comforting weight that she instinctively leaned into, her own arm sliding around his waist. “So let’s get the kids and worry about dinner, all right?”

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Tilly to Arthur and Sadie**  
Dear Arthur and Sadie,  
After Mary-Beth told me she run into you up in Valentine I was real pleased to receive your letter. So good to hear from you, and to hear you both are well. As you can imagine hearing that from her was some shock given I’ll be honest and say I never expected you to be alive still, Arthur, given how sure John seemed of you being dead when he got to Copperhead Landing. Think I never been so glad to be mistaken about a thing as that. Mary-Beth being as she is, of course, she launched into talking about this grand romance before anything, saying she knew it all along. I suppose looking back maybe she’s right. Maybe there was something at work bigger than us all that made Sadie go back that night.

I got to admit I am a bit jealous of Mary-Beth for having seen you and met your babies, so if you have a picture to send to an old friend I would appreciate that very much.

Things here are good. I work as a secretary in the law offices of D’Aubris and Gaudet, which being colored folk would not do well in many cities, but St. Denis has always been a strange beast it seems. The more I learn about it, and how there was so many free people of color here even before the war, a whole society of them, it seems like a city where there is potential to be somebody. It ain’t perfect, we still are lower in the order of things, but if I walk down the street with my beau (there’s some French for you!) and him and me dressed finer than I ever been in my life, nobody looks twice at us.

Bet you read that last line with some surprise. I ain’t a little girl no more, Arthur. Maybe I weren’t even when you found me on the run from the Foremans. His name is Louis Petit, and he comes from Haiti. Heard of Guarma, he has, and the revolution there, when I asked, though you don’t need to worry none that I told him why. He knows enough about who I was, but I said I read all that in a newspaper. A smart man, and one determined to fight for colored folk to be equal under the laws of America. Most of all, he is kind, and gentle, and funny.

Write me, and Mary-Beth, again soon if you would. I know this city has its scars for you both, Arthur especially, but if you are ever nearby St. Denis please come visit. Scars don’t mean a thing can’t still be fine and beautiful if you look closer. Besides, I’d love to see you again. All of them days are long gone, but I still miss you. Have you heard anything about Abigail and John? We five, and little Jack, was the last ones left in Beaver Hollow who cared for more than Dutch’s craziness. We saw the very end and the very worst of it in a way folk like Mary-Beth and Pearson and Swanson never did. We stayed for each other, and bond like that, it means something. I expect it always will.

Be well, and be assured I’m living that good life you hoped I would.  
Tilly


	38. Minnewakan: Beside Still Waters

The trek to Rainbow Lake, the reserve of the Wawashkeshi, took several hours as it was past Frank Frazier’s weatherbeaten agent station, but Sadie could see in the Hehakaton still the remnants of a people who’d been used to living on the move following the bison herds. They packed a few things, gifts included for their hosts, and soon the wagons and horses were underway to the north with impressive speed and efficiency.

“Explain this to me again,” Sadie asked Bright Waters, riding alongside her. Arthur and Charles were driving the wagon with Felipe and Karen, come to make the rounds, the kids, plus some supplies and gifts for their hosts. “I know we’re coming along as your guests. Don’t want to reflect poorly on your people and Rains Fall by being ignorant fools.”

She nodded thoughtfully. “We’re permitted to gather together with the Wawashkeshi and the Keyakaton every July 1st. Dominion Day. Folk in charge overlook us holding a big _pow wow_ \--a gathering. We can do some of our dances and ceremonies tomorrow, cause the government thinks it’s all right with us celebrating so patriotically. It was just the same with Independence Day in America.” She gave Sadie a grin, eyes crinkling in merriment. “Not bad for a bunch of dumb Indians, huh?”

“Every woman knows a thing or two about that,” she answered, smiling herself at it. “When you ain’t allowed in charge of the game, you learn to play it smarter.”

Bright Waters laughed at that. “Yeah, you have the right of it there. We change hosts every year--Minnewakan, Minnehanweton, and Rainbow Lake. And so it’s Rainbow Lake’s turn this year. As for what to do?” She shrugged, nudging her horse with her knees to keep pace with Bob. “Anything genuinely sacred for any of the tribes, you wouldn’t be allowed into. We’d also hide it better from Frazier and others.” She said it without apology or rancor. “This is friendship and fun. So look, listen, don’t hurry to talk. Be good guests to our neighbors as you have been to us.” 

She nodded, absorbing that, grateful for the information. “Thanks for the advice.”

As they headed through the sun-dappled lane shaded by pines into the heart of Rainbow Lake, it looked more settled than the still-building ways of Minnewakan, the shacks and cabins looking weathered and patched and partially rebuilt in some cases. But then, the Wawashkeshi had been here a few decades. Minnehanweton had the same feel to it too, when they’d visited on behalf of Rains Fall along with Charles.

Several Wawashkeshi waited at the end of the lane, two fires on either side of it burning with a pleasant fragrance she couldn’t quite identify, wafting it towards the travelers as they passed between the fires, singing a song that she already itched to record in her songbook if she could. The language they sang in was little like Hehakaton--she couldn’t understand most of it beyond some phrases and words, but she’d learned the sound of that language, and the sound of this one was clearly different. Something like Welsh and Spanish, she thought. Both from Europe, sure, but nothing alike. Made sense that the tribes would have different languages too, and even if they’d been shoved together as neighbors, that language gap remained. “It hard living near folk who speak a different language?” she asked Bright Waters.

“We learn what we can, and so do they,” she answered. “Most of us, the younger ones anyhow, speak English too.”

“Better than Arthur and me,” she admitted with a rueful chuckle. “We got to Mexico and both of us barely spoke a lick of Spanish.”

“But you learned.” Her eyes were intent on Sadie’s for a moment. “You didn’t expect them to bend for you.”

“It was more a convenience at first,” she admitted. If they hadn’t had all that idle time to begin, she wasn’t sure they’d have learned so quickly. Chances were they wouldn’t have ended up in Mexico anyway--they’d have come here to Canada along with the tribe. “Something to pass the time while Arthur was healing. But--we learned to see things differently, and to listen. Eventually.” Sometimes she still remembered the Avilas back in Tesoro Azul, the guts they’d had in staring her and Arthur down and telling them to stop congratulating themselves. It probably did them good to have that long before coming up here to Minnewakan, because it had taught them to shut up, to listen to what people said they needed, rather than just assuming.

Problems in Mexico beyond their power to fix, and problems here just the same. Things that went right up to the level of government, and it still felt unfair to know it, but at least they’d learned how best to help where they had that power. 

A crowd of horses and wagons filled the field beside Rainbow Lake, a smaller comma-shaped body of water compared to the long, broad Spirit Lake to the east. But the sparkle of a rainbow in the dancing mist of a waterfall towards its northern end told her where it got its name. A crowd of people here, and she picked up Mattie, settling him against her hip. He fussed grumpily at that, obviously wanting to be set down. He was far more comfortable and confident in his walking now, and even starting to try and take a few stumbling running strides, so he cherished that proud freedom, but she soothed him, holding him close. “We’ll let you down soon enough when things settle, _niño_. Too many folk and too much excitement just now.” 

Moving with the current of people, like an incoming tide, they headed for the center of the village. More of the Wawashkeshi singing what she assumed was some kind of welcome song, and she felt Arthur’s hand slip into her free one. She looked over at him and smiled. 

“Feels a bit like the big Christmas parties back in Chuparosa, don’t it?” he asked, green eyes bright. “Folk coming from the whole region for it.” He grinned at her almost boyishly. “The last few was pretty tame after that first one chasing bandits.”

“Ain’t complaining,” she said, nudging his thigh with her hip.

There were a few other white faces present, people she judged to be either trusted friends or husbands and wives in a few cases, but she noticed the careful looks, aware they were being watched and judged as Hehakaton guests.

Seated by the fire, she watched the ceremonies continue, and startled a little as a woman leaned over and began talking to her. “Loon Caller is greeting our guests in the name of our people,” she said, gesturing to the Wawashkeshi chief, talking to Rains Fall and Clouds Gathering. “You walked through the fires of the four sacred medicines as you came in--tobacco, sweetgrass, sage, and cedar. It banishes the bad spirits both here and any brought in.”

Arthur glanced at their would-be teacher. “We look that clueless?” he joked, but gently enough to make it clear he was being tongue-in-cheek.

“You both look that interested, and not in that horrified judging way,” the woman corrected. “I’m Dawn Approaches.”

“Sadie Griffith,” she answered, then gesturing with a thumb towards Arthur, “and my husband, Arthur. We’re staying at Minnewakan. Know Rains Fall from back before his people come north from America.”

“We heard about you,” Dawn Approaches said with a bit of a smile. “Word gets around pretty well, for all we don’t get to travel between reserves that often. Heard you’re helpful. Kind. That you were good friends to the people of Rains Fall, both then and now.”

“Don’t know about that,” Arthur muttered, blushing a little. “Done a few things, but don’t seem like that much.”

Dawn Approaches cocked an eyebrow at that, wolf-amber brown eyes glittering with good humor, looking over at Sadie. “He always awkwardly humble like this?”

“Pretty much,” Sadie said dryly, and couldn’t help but smile at the other woman’s laugh. Arthur rubbed the back of his neck sheepishly.

Sitting there with their apparent new friend, Sadie listened while she explained some of the dances and songs going on, listening with fascination. “I keep a song journal,” she said. “You mind maybe letting me get some of them songs from you and others before we leave tomorrow? It’s...the Hehakaton, they like it cause it gets them written down.”

“It’s a white man’s world,” Dawn Approaches said with a shrug. “We knew that a long time before the Hehakaton did. Things don’t matter now until they’re written down. Sometimes not even then, if it’s a treaty. But yes, my people will tell you these things. We don’t want all our ways vanished. So long as you write it honestly, and you respect what things we say we won’t give.” She looked at Sadie intently at that, and it took most of what she had to not flinch and instinctively apologize for all those who hadn’t listened to a “no” from the Wawashkeshi and others.

“Done,” she said. That was about what she’d gotten with the Hehakaton too. Content enough to take it all in as they moved from opening ceremonies to the giving of gifts and swearing of kinship, she saw the kids getting sleepy and restless as the sun tracked its way towards dusk. 

Dawn Approaches gave a small smile as Bea tugged restlessly at Arthur’s sleeve, making it obvious she needed to go tend to business. Arthur nodded, pushing up and looking around with a questioning glance. “About two minutes’ walk that way,” Dawn Approaches said, pointing him to the north. She looked at Mattie, asleep beside Sadie already. “Long day for them.”

“It has been,” she said, “real exciting too.” She glanced around, seeing some of the others there with their kids, watching the ceremonies. “You got some of your own?”

“My wife and me talk about it sometimes.”

“Kids are the best thing I got, but gotta admit, sometimes it’s hard.” She didn’t question the ‘wife’ part. She’d gotten past all that since Marion, and since Arthur had gotten her to admit to those feelings she had within herself. So apparently things like that could happen more openly among the Wawashkeshi, whereas even the Hehakaton took a harder stance on it.

Dawn Approaches hesitated, face half-turned away, then seemed to muster her courage to say something. She glanced at Sadie, gestured to Sadie’s pants, then her own. “I’m...I had heard about you and your husband, but when I saw how you dress, I wanted to speak with you. I didn’t think white people had _ininiikaazo_.”

“You’re gonna have to explain that, I’m afraid.”

Dawn Approaches obviously gathered her thoughts at that for a moment, eyes turning thoughtful. “It’s...best way I can put it is one with a man’s spirit, I guess, in a woman’s body. Not exactly right either, but maybe it’s as close as I can get to explaining it in a way you understand.”

“So you live as a--in your heart, you’re a man.” It felt strange for a moment, but then she supposed it made sense. That part of her that looked a little too long at a pretty woman was something that wasn’t supposed to be either, according to most. Someone born in one body but feeling wrong in it? That could happen. 

“Yes.” She--he--nodded, a look of relief at being understood. “I hunt. I fish. I took a wife. In years past I would have gone to war with my brothers, before we lived in peace.” 

Sadie shook her head. “It’s hard to explain on my side too. I ain’t a proper woman in a lot of ways, it seems. Wearing pants, hunting, cussing, all of that. I grew up sometimes wishing I was a boy so I could do all them things. But the thing is, I never felt I _was_ a boy. In my heart, I’m a woman.” She gave a slight shrug. “I’m sorry if that’s a disappointment,” feeling so awkward at saying it, hoping the man hadn’t been looking for kinship and now felt crushed to not find it in that particular shape. “Maybe there are white folks like that, but I ain’t sure.”

He laughed. “That’s all right. I wasn’t sure. I know the Hehakaton and Keyakaton ain’t got folk quite like me. Thanks for answering my curiosity. And don’t feel out of place. We’ve had some warrior women.”

Arthur came back with Bea just as the last of the gift-giving ceremonies ended, and then dinner came as they all ate around the fire. Different fare from Minnewakan, more fish, things like wild rice, and she couldn’t help but sigh with pleasure at the taste of maple syrup again, laughter and good spirits going around the entire crowd. She could see various people talking like old friends, and chances were they were, and this annual catch-up turned into an enthusiastic reunion to be wrung out for every possible moment. She wasn’t unfamiliar with absent friends, people seen only rarely and kept in touch by letter otherwise, but it felt curiously sad to know that for these tribes, those friends, or even family, were only a couple hours away and the distance was one of policy, not necessarily geography.

After the meal, things got more low key, some songs being sung, games being played, and stories being told. More of the big dances and the like would be tomorrow before everyone headed home, so Bright Waters had told her, the big show under the careful cover of occurring on Dominion Day. This was quieter ties of kinship and friendship for the night. 

There seemed to be an almost universal sense among parents, no matter what people they came from, when young kids were fading out. Not too long after the meal, while more songs were being sung and games being played, almost as a singular wave, the parents started to trudge away from the fire, carrying infants or gripping toddlers by the hand. Directed to a large lodge by a man named Stony Grasp set up for visitors, she and Arthur found pallets made up of wool blankets and furs, and tucked the kids in. Karen did the same for Danny nearby. She kissed Bea on the forehead, smoothing away her little girl’s wild blond curls, not quite long enough yet to pull back. “Night, Bean.”

She saw Arthur trying to say goodnight to Danny as he had for so long, and the little boy insisted, “No, want Uncle Charles!” 

Arthur sat back, and for a split second she saw the hint of some kind of hurt in his expression, before he hid it. “All right, kiddo, your momma will be sure Charles comes to say good night.” 

Hitching back up to his feet, he headed back out, and she followed, not sure quite what to say or whether there was anything to say that would help.

They ended up around a fire with Dawn Approaches, Felipe, Bright Waters, shy young Dances for the Elk, and Dawn Approaches’s wife, a Wawashkeshi woman named Seen Beneath the Northern Lights, though she told them, with amusement, “Call me ‘Aurora’ if you like. It’s the white name I got them to give me and my real name’s a mouthful in English.”

She sat back for a bit, content to let them talk things over as they needed, listening to the flow of things first. Though when Aurora mentioned, “Star Gazer thinks the wendigo ceremony worked,” she couldn’t help but pay attention, remembering Frank Frazier and Bright Waters having a discussion a few weeks prior.

“Wendigo, that’s a--cannibal monster, isn’t it?” she asked. “So I heard.”

“Not quite,” Aurora answered. “Wendigo is...yes, it’s a cannibal, a person taken over by a bad spirit and turned into a monster. But mostly it’s a spirit of greed. It has a craving that never ends, always devouring. Forgetting goodness, forgetting taboos, forgetting family and tribe, forgetting anything but feeding its hunger.”

“Plenty of white folk like that, sure,” Arthur muttered. “What’s this thing look like?”

“Thin, cause its feeding never stops its hunger. You can see its bones. Pale and ashen, like the dead. Bloody lips.”

“Sounds a lot like tuberculosis patients to me,” Felipe said, sighing. “Though I don’t think your people are mistaking TB victims for wendigos. They’re too tired to eat, mostly. Though there’s been some interesting folklore of tuberculosis mistaken for vampirism…”

“We know tuberculosis too, Dr. Garcia. We’ve watched some of our tribe die of it. The wendigo is real,” Dawn Approaches said, shaking his head. “It was here. But we banished it.”

“What did it do?” Sadie asked.

“It slaughtered a family on the far north of the reserve,” Dawn Approaches answered. “A white family too about ten miles away, so I heard, though I couldn’t go see that.” He shook his head, a haunted look on his face that Sadie couldn’t help but note. “If their home was anything like Heron and Thunder Before the Storm--” A shudder went down his spine. “It was like the worst of human and animal both.”

A shiver went down Sadie’s spine too, remembering monsters who had been that too, the worst of human cunning and animal appetite. They hadn’t come to Pinetree Gulch for robbing, because there was almost nothing worth taking. They came for blood and pain and making a game of it. Possessed by something _wrong_ , and maybe “wendigo” was as good a name for it as any. What a state they’d left Jake in, and what a state they’d have left her in, had Arthur and the others not shown up by chance that night. 

“You sure this thing’s gone?” she asked, hearing the rough edge in her voice.

“It’s gone for now. It can be banished. But it’ll be back, eventually,” Aurora answered, glancing into the fire with a distant look. “There’ll always be another one eventually. Greed don’t stop.”

“Maybe Arthur and me should go take a look at the cabins,” she said. It seemed like a way they could help. “We’re good at tracking and the like.” If there was more human than beast to their wendigo, and they were two people who could go look off the reserve also, they might be the right people for the job. If there was something, or someone, dangerous out there, best to not leave it be.

He looked at her quizzically, brows furrowed. “Seems to me they got it handled as best they can, Sadie.” 

Something in her quietly seethed a bit at him so flatly dismissing her, like it had been a stupid suggestion. “There may well be nothing left to see, Sadie. This was a while ago, right?” Bright Waters replied. “Rains Fall heard something about it back in--must have been April.”

“About two and a half months, yes,” Dawn Approaches answered. “Loon Caller didn’t tell Frazier for a good while. No point, until he had to report Heron and Thunder Before the Storm were dead for quarterly updates.” He shrugged. “He’s not a bad man but he wouldn’t believe us.”

“You’re not wrong. He assumed it was a body in the woods chewed by scavengers,” Bright Waters said dryly, giving a bit of a laugh and a sigh. “I told them you foks ain’t stupid.”

Night fell fast, the stars bright in the summer sky, and with the stories and songs and good cheer, it made for a fine evening. Though when things broke up, she realized that Arthur hadn’t come back yet from his supposed trip to the outhouse. Sighing, making her way through some people trudging towards their homes or guest pallets, she headed for the lakeshore, guessing that was where he’d be. She’d found sometimes at Clemens Point that he’d go upshore a bit, around the point, close enough to be within shouting distance of camp if need be and see the fires through the woods, but separate, alone, for a little while. She’d found that because she’d done it too, needing to get away from the noise and the people.

Though on her way she saw Karen tugging Charles by the hand into the shelter of the woods, both of them laughing, and ducked against a tree for cover, hoping they hadn’t seen her, and smothering her own sudden laughter with a fist against her mouth. For two people who claimed they were just making time together, they certainly seemed to have made a good partnership of it.

Grabbing a lantern because of the darkness, she found him perhaps five minutes’ walk upshore, perched on a log, looking out over the water. Setting down the lantern, she sat down beside him. “Makes you think of evenings of you and me sitting on a log back at Clemens, sharing a cigarette and some peace and quiet.”

“Guess everything changes eventually.” 

“The cigarettes, sure.” She nudged his shoulder with hers. “Just saw Charles and Karen off to have a merry old time in the woods. Them two, I swear.”

“How about that,” and she could hear some humor in his voice, but it still felt flat. So Danny, or something else, had upset him, that much was obvious. Usually she could coax him out of his moods eventually, as he could for her, so she’d give it a try. 

“Kids are in bed,” she suggested, leaning in closer, putting a hand on his thigh. “Pretty quiet up here.” Besides, some part of her liked the thought. The first time they’d been together had been a quiet lakeshore too, and the chance for something like that had been so rare since. Maybe it would help, reminding him of how it had been that day. Both of them scared down to their bones from the wounds they carried, worried to cause painful reminders or ruin things between them by finding this thing was the one place they couldn’t make it work. But they’d been there for each other through it, and found the joy that was possible beyond the fear.

“Not tonight, all right?” He said it softly, and he took her hand in his, but the way he took it off of him, making it clear that wasn’t in the cards, it all at once it felt like it was as much putting up that barrier as being close to her.

“This about Danny wanting Charles instead?” she ventured, careful how she did it, knowing only the pain was there but not quite how to bring it out and let it drain away. “Honey, look, he’s only a little boy, he don’t mean nothing by it. Charles has been there to tuck him in these last couple of months, not you, that’s all. He’s got used to that. You know how kids is at that age from Bea.”

“I know that, yeah.”

“Besides, it’s probably best, ain’t it?”

“What you mean by that?”

“I mean ain’t it better to hope Danny learns to look to someone besides you? You been a good uncle, Arthur, but--”

“Charles and Karen made it real clear. Danny’s got a man playing house with his momma for a couple months,” Arthur said, practically snapping the words. “So what about when he leaves? Ain’t gonna be Charles there when Danny’s upset at it.” 

Taken aback at the vehemence, she answered, “So, what, this is Karen’s fault? For wanting some happiness for herself?” She shook her head, surprised. It wasn’t like him to act judgmental about that, and expect Karen to be a celibate saint devoted only to her boy because she’d made a few mistakes and got pregnant.

“I don’t care who Karen’s making time with, that ain’t the point and that’s her business, I’m just saying she shouldn’t have brought Danny into it. And Charles shouldn’t be that damn careless either.”

“They was sharing a cabin and it _happened_ , Arthur, it ain’t like they planned it or nothing.” She looked over at him, shaking her head, sighing, feeling like she’d finally put her finger on it. Reluctant to prod that wound, but feeling like she had to cause the small hurt in the interest of not letting this turn to rot inside him, she went for it, straightforward and blunt. “You ain’t his father, Arthur, and he ain’t Isaac. So don’t go making it your business.”

He pushed up off the log, rising to his feet. His voice got that cool, clipped tone she recognized, the one he used as a big man pushing back at people, the icy sense of control that unnerved people even more than hints of temper, especially with him looming over her. “So, let me get this straight. I can’t worry for the sake of a boy I cared for since he was born, cause I wasn’t the man who got Karen pregnant. You’d be plenty pissed if he was mine, and we both know that blood ain’t the only thing that counts, so can we drop that notion? Been the closest thing to a father he’s got.”

“He ain’t Isaac, Arthur,” she insisted again, feeling that attempt to intimidate her, however deliberate or not it might be, pushing at the boundaries of her own temper enough to let it slip loose. She shoved up to her own feet, determined to meet him on that at least. “And what, you think you being a man who messed up with your son gives you the right to tell everyone how they get to live their lives?”

“I loved Isaac, damn you!”

“You did. But you only showed up once in a blue moon. It was Eliza who knew what was best for him.” It was cruel and some part of her knew it, but it also wasn’t untrue, and she had to puncture that Goddamn self-righteousness he had going on and make him see that he couldn’t make Danny into Isaac, make up for his mistakes that way. “You don’t get to make choices for Danny. That’s Karen’s job.”

“So I’m a sad excuse for a father. Fine.”

“I ain’t saying you are.” The frustration welled up in her even more, because he was determined to take everything as an insult right now, so sensitive to any hard truth that he couldn’t handle it without dramatics.

“Well, you sure as shit seem to be.”

She didn’t know why he was determined to turn this whole thing into an attack with her as the vicious harpy, but more of the restraints on her temper broke. “Fine. Have it your way. You wanna worry Danny’s not being done right by Karen and Charles? Worry about doing right by your own two first. You _are_ their father, and you spoil them. Bea’s getting old enough she needs discipline too, and don’t think I ain’t seen how she runs to you and cries when I tell her ‘no’ and you give her whatever she wants.” She was tired of being the mean bitch, and the only one who seemed to give a damn that their kids not grow up feckless selfish little hellions.

“She’s two years old, Sadie. She’s gonna have to grow up fast enough. Let her be a little kid.” 

“She’s gotta start to learn, Arthur. For as pissed off as you were about how Dutch spoiled John, you’re doing the same Goddamn thing.” It would do Bea and Mattie no favors to always have their way, to have no structure or accountability.

“So what? I smack her, show her who’s boss like my daddy did? Twist her head all up in knots like Dutch done to me? When did it become a sin to try to make your kid happy?” 

“Look, I ain’t saying anything like beating her, or messing with her head. Just cause your life as a kid was really messed up--”

She realized she’d accidentally pushed a button there when he cut her off, voice going rougher and even more furious. “Sure. Next time she does something wrong, maybe we make her go to bed hungry. She gets a bit older, she gets to go sleep outside and dig through the garbage to eat. That’ll teach her to appreciate things, won’t it?” 

For a moment the thought of him as a small boy, hopeless and alone and rummaging through the trash for food, hit her with a pang, but she brushed it aside. That wasn’t the point right now, she couldn’t let him use that to twist her heart and avoid the actual problem, and the attempt to do so actually pissed her off even more. “Now you’re just being ridiculous.” If he was determined to pretend affectionate discipline and throwing a child into a world of horrors were the same thing, she couldn’t talk any sense to him. “There’s a world of difference in what I’m saying and that, and it ain’t my fault your father was a bastard and Dutch was a maniac so you can’t even see it.”

“Right. We do it just like you say, boss,” he drawled, squaring up his shoulders as if he was preparing for a physical fight rather than hard words. “Just like your parents done for you. Your folks, Sadie? Your good, kind, decent God-fearing momma and daddy? They smothered their kids. So we’ll see whether they turn out like Caroline, or like you. So much in a hurry to leave they couldn’t barely say goodbye before running a few thousand miles away with some stranger, or so afraid to want to live their own lives they stay tied to a shitty piece of dirt that wasn’t never gonna be worth keeping.”

The fury rose within her even more, hearing him mock her parents like that, and she knew her mouth was running away with her, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to talk to her like that, wasn’t going to talk about her family like that, wasn’t going to make fun and judge. As though he had a right to talk. Her hands were at her side now, balled into tight fists. “Like you can get on a high horse? You tried to do both, you damn fool. You near ran away with Mary Linton just to escape, then you stayed on Dutch’s leash all them years instead, and anytime he said jump, my God, did you leap. Least my folks never pushed me to do the things Dutch did to you.”

“At least I’ll admit it, and try to put it behind me,” and there was a strange look of mingled shame and triumph on his face at that. “More than you can say.”

“And what exactly you mean by that?” 

“Don’t think I ain’t heard you pushing the idea of chasing bounties again these last few weeks. That ‘Oh this one, he’s just a cattle rustler, we’d be back by tonight. Easy money.’ We said we was done with all that,” and he made a clear, emphatic chop of his hand in the air.

They’d said that, and meant it, but these last few weeks, she’d had to rethink some things. “That was before we needed money so bad.” She sensed too late she’d walked right into a potential snare with that, because both of them knew damn well why they were in debt. She crossed her arms over her chest, shrugging impatiently. “We ain’t coming up with other ideas, so why not? It’s honest enough work. Or you go find us something that pays enough, rather than just wringing your hands. Cause I ain’t doing the work here while you sit at home.”

He gave her an almost wolfish smile at that. She realized he’d heard something in her tone, something in her stomach dropping at it. This time he didn’t hold his strike either. “Sounds like an old irritation you got there. Jake was like that, huh? All that crap about ‘we shared all the work’. Plus he racked up debts he didn’t tell you about--I swear, man must have been a sweet talker and really something in bed, cause you was smitten blind.”

It hadn’t been Jake’s fault. He was a good farmer, he’d work himself to exhaustion for it and had often enough, and he did so much around the homestead, but it wasn’t primarily farm country. She was better at the hunting and trapping that Ambarino constantly obliged, and they both knew it, plus he’d hurt his back and that gave him grief sometimes. He worked as hard as he could at the things he was good at, that was all. Though sometimes she’d felt a pang of frustrated resentment at the situation they’d found themselves in, she’d admit that. But the debt still hurt, especially how he’d kept that from her, and the pain of that mingled with the situation right now. 

Though Jake was nothing like Dutch with his lies and seduction and oily nature, and that implication disgusted her. She got a finger up in Arthur’s face, sheer unbridled rage driving her on now, and the determination that he couldn’t cow her into submission. “Don’t you dare--”

“Oh, I can’t ever say anything against Saint Jake, you made that clear. I just gotta eat his damn debt with a smile, cause he was good and decent and everything I ain’t. At least I don’t ask you to do nothing I won’t do myself.”

“You don’t have the first clue. You still live in this imaginary world you made, don’t you? Can’t admit you loved Eliza even now, cause you don’t wanna face that a woman raising your child wasn’t romantic enough compared to mooning over some stupid boy’s fantasy with Mary. Now you got notions that all we need to do is hope hard enough and it’ll all work out. Me? I’m willing to play rough and do whatever it takes to keep my kids fed. If that’s hauling in some bad men to get their necks stretched, so what? Better world for it.” As far as she was concerned, sending them to hell was a public good, and if they got paid for it and helped secure their futures, so much the better. 

He let out a harsh bark of laughter at that. “I never depended on hope it’ll get better. There’s a difference between being cautious and being a coward, that’s all. And I’ll get my hands plenty dirty if I must. I always have.” He took a step closer to her, and she could see in the moonlight and faint wash of the lantern was how his eyes had gone wide and hard with anger. “You just wanna be washed clean, hallelujah, and pretend you always been on the side of the righteous, that you never was a killer gone crazy. Seems you’re the one living in some imaginary world. Though I suppose if you’re so hellbent on turning in every evil bastard for his due, you’d better start close to home. You got no use for me, that’s damn clear. I’m probably worth at least five hundred bucks by now. Clear that debt in no time.” 

She slapped him before she could even think about it, the shame at being reminded of those worst and darkest days, and the sheer anger at the implication she was mercenary enough to watch him hang for money, that she didn’t care for him at all, finally too much.

Then everything was too much to withstand, the rage and the shame and the memories, and she couldn’t face him or herself, thinking maybe she’d kill him if he kept talking, so she hurried away, crashing noisily through the bushes like some wounded bear. Breath coming in great gasping gulps, something halfway to a sob or a scream, until she rested finally, leaning against a great tall spruce tree, head bowed, trying to pull all the pieces of herself back together where they’d seemed to have come unstitched.

She’d wandered into the desert once when she was little, only a few years older than Bea, chasing something. She couldn’t even recall what now. She’d gotten lost. Alone and frightened, she’d huddled beside a boulder, fierce sun baking down on her until her vision started to waver and her tongue felt like chewing on a wad of cotton, feeling the panicked terror of realizing she’d been overwhelmed by a situation she’d charged into, and not sure what to do.

This felt a little like that. They’d fought, her and Arthur, argued plenty over various things. But never like this, merciless and furious and every bit as out of control as she’d once been in taking lives. She’d never fought like this with Jake either. Jake just wouldn’t fight like that, didn’t have enough temper for it, and when she pushed he’d usually either back down or get quiet and walk away. That was its own problem, given she’d been left feeling like the man cheated and got the last word by refusing to engage, but it at least let her cool down. 

Shaken and appalled and now full of a stomach-churning regret once the power of the anger drained from her, she couldn’t help but feel sick. She’d told Jake years ago, in that dream where she’d said goodbye, that she thought there was something fragile in Arthur after how much he’d been hurt, that she worried she could destroy him without meaning it.

She only hoped she hadn’t done that. Even as he went after her, she’d attacked nearly everything she knew he’d always held so close as his own personal pain and shame and guilt. Isaac, Eliza, Mary, the things he’d done for Dutch, Lyle’s mean streak, the way he’d lived on the streets. Nearly every vulnerability he’d given her, she’d gone after, every bit as much as he’d ruthlessly targeted her own weak spots. 

All she’d meant was to find him and try to make him feel better about Danny, and somehow they’d ended up yelling at each other fit to kill, and she still didn’t fully understand how.

Maybe he wasn’t entirely wrong about her parents. They’d been shaped by the land they’d bought in some ways, become as hard and demanding as the desert they lived in. But they’d loved her, in ways he hadn’t been loved. One thing May Griffith had taught her, one last piece of advice not long before she’d passed, that she’d used more than once with both Jake and Arthur. _Husbands and wives are gonna fight. But don’t go to bed stewing and all smug that you’re right and he’d better come find you to apologize. You get a sun rising on that anger still inside you, it starts to harden like clay._

She waited a good while longer out among the moonlit trees, trying to let the last of the feelings pass, to find some kernel of calm within her. Wanting to let even that concern that they’d done some kind of irreparable damage to the trust between them flow away like water, because she couldn’t bear to face him with that kind of fear in her. Couldn’t look at him and worry that the best of them had been lost in a few minutes in the Canadian woods. 

Then she squared her shoulders as best she could, thought the weight of it felt so heavy, and headed back, hoping she’d find him there yet.

~~~~~~~~~~

The feeling of being too stunned to move was nothing new to him. Though usually he could chalk it up to a brawl, or being thrown from a horse, or knocked down by the edge of a dynamite blast, or falling from a train or stagecoach. Standing there very calmly listing all the reasons he’d been effectively paralyzed in his life--though it wasn’t calm, not really, this was peculiar empty feeling that came from a place of being loaded with too much to bear and something breaking inside.

He managed to get unstuck enough to move back beside the lantern Sadie had set down on the ground, and to sit back down on that log. Seemed like he couldn’t do much of anything else, because even that little bit felt as exhausting as those first steps out of bed at Las Hermanas, years ago now. 

He wasn’t sure exactly what had happened, or how. He’d left to go think some things over--all right, maybe to brood a bit in privacy too. Not blaming Danny as such, though the boy demanding Charles instead had stung. All right, it hurt like hell. But mostly it was knowing that he’d be left to pick up the pieces of things when Karen and Charles’ arrangement ran its course, and Danny was left crying and upset come fall. It wasn’t them sleeping together. It was that he should have seen this coming back in April when they’d all arrived and Charles had Karen and Danny move in with him.

Danny wasn’t Isaac. He knew that. But he was the only damn one of them who knew what it did to a kid having someone walk away, and Karen, Sadie, and Charles didn’t see it clearly.

Worry about his own kids first, Sadie insisted. Saying he was failing them too, and maybe that was all he could ever have expected, and how could he have been so stupid as to think he had something to give a child? Even if he wasn’t a thief and a killer anymore, he didn’t know what he was doing. Sadie wasn’t wrong. The fathers he’d had were a drunk violent bastard, a soulless maniac who’d used him and threw him away, and a conman who hadn’t quite known what he was doing either because his own shitty bastard of a father had seen him only three times in his life. 

He loved them, and that meant putting them first. Maybe the best thing he could do was not mess them up, admit that he had nothing in him that his children could want or use. Maybe he should just go, and love them best by doing it. Sadie had made it clear he wasn’t making much of a job of it, and she’d effectively told him she didn’t think much of him as a husband either. 

_You knew this day was coming, didn’t you?_ The day all the pretty delusions came crashing down, and Sadie realized what she’d bought was a laughably bad bargain, one she wanted to give back. He should go. He should. But remembering Isaac begging him to stay cut right across that. Pulled in two different directions and coming apart at the seams by it. No matter what he did, now he’d hurt them. What right had he ever had to bring children into this? Stupid bastard. 

Stuck. Stuck. _Fuck_. 

His hands were shaking, and he clasped them to try to stop it, glancing down at his wedding ring for a second almost mocking him with his failure, then staring off into the darkness over the water. He shouldn’t have said anything. He should have just agreed with her and they’d have gone on as usual. He’d done that for years, hadn’t he? Had to shut up and agree and not fight back because all it got him was more pain, and this pain, oh, this was the worst yet because he’d been enough of a glorious Goddamn fool to actually go and be happy, give himself something to lose, people he could hurt when he inevitably let them down. 

But all those years of nodding and agreeing got to him, and he’d lashed out every bit as hard as her, knowing full well her temper matched his but not giving a damn. Gone after her parents, gone after Jake, gone after that insecurity about how bloodthirsty and awful she’d been in her wrath, gone after the spots she was most easily wounded, because maybe for once he’d wanted to not be the only one made to feel small and despicable, to not simply submit to being belittled and berated. The feeling of victory was hollow as anything now, though.

He had no idea what to do, because it seemed like there was no way out. Nothing he could do to fix this, because he couldn’t make himself into someone better. He felt like he couldn’t breathe in a way he hadn’t since the agony and cough of the TB. He heard the snap of a branch and looked up, seeing Sadie standing there. She could pass through the woods silent as a ghost, so she must have done it on purpose to let him know she was there, not startled him. He wondered how long she’d been there, watching him sit there like a dumbass, struggling to do anything at all around the hurricane raging in his head. 

She’d come back. Maybe she had more to say, more hard words to throw his way, and he braced himself for it. He didn’t think he had anything left. Like some wounded animal she’d tracked down and maybe she’d do him the mercy of finishing him off now. 

Though she didn’t say anything right away. He watched her, looking at him. Heard the gentle lap of the water against the shore, the splash of a fish jumping somewhere nearby. Saw the bright pulsing flicker of fireflies dancing along the shore near Sadie. Bea loved them. He’d watched her chasing them back at Minnewakan the night before, giddy with delight. 

He’d promised her if they could find a jar, maybe they’d try to catch a few for her to keep to study the next day, then let them go again. One more thing he could disappoint on, he supposed.

She hadn’t moved closer, barely into the circle of the lamp light. On the ground as it was, her face was cast in shadow, as it had been while they argued and shouted. He started to wonder curiously if she felt as frozen as he did.

Something finally gave, and she said, voice rough, an odd quiver in her words, “That’s a look I ain’t seen on your face in a long time.”

“What look’s that?”

“That one where you’re wondering if you should run, or if I’m gonna walk away.” He closed his eyes a moment, because she’d seen it clearly, and he didn’t want her seeing more. He already felt scoured raw enough by her tonight, then opened them because it was pointless to hide, wasn't it? She took a step closer. “Can I sit?”

Something had shifted in her too, something careful and gentle now. Like she’d seen as much as he had how they could drag each other through the fire, and how much it would burn. But she’d come back, and maybe not to yell at him further. Wordlessly, he gestured to the log beside him.

She sat, turning to him. Much as he’d insisted he wasn’t a man to just sit there and hope, he felt that small traitorous flicker all the same. But it could be she’d come to give the killing blow with gentleness rather than fury. “You want me to go?” he asked, trying as hard as he could to keep his voice even, knowing he didn’t quite hit the mark.

“No!” Then there she was, grabbing hold of him, and he couldn’t help it, he should know better, but he ended up holding her every bit as tightly, both of them clinging to each other like a pair of shipwrecked sailors cast adrift, so close that any space at all felt like too much and they were trying to join as one every bit as much as making love. Her fingers gripped too hard, enough so he might have bruises in the morning, and probably he returned the favor, but somehow that didn’t matter. He felt like something loosened in his chest, able to breathe again, inhaling the scent of her, as familiar and as dear as the feel of her in his arms, and he couldn’t bear to let go, couldn’t bear to walk away, and maybe, just maybe, things would be all right, though he couldn’t see how.

It felt like starting with the end, the thing that finally got to be too much, was the best place to begin, because trying to undo the whole knotted mess of it was overwhelming yet. Picking an end and trying to tease it loose from there felt best. “I’m sorry, all right? I’m sorry. It was stupid of me to say you ought to turn me in. I know you’re a loyal one. Hell, you didn’t turn on us when we was just a bunch of degenerates you got stuck with to get out of the mountains. You could have gone from Horseshoe to Valentine and done it and rode away a rich woman. You didn’t. You put that much effort into keeping me alive too.”

He couldn’t look at her face as he said it, tucked up against each other as they were, but that didn’t matter. It was easier to talk like this, somehow. “I shouldn’t have slapped you,” she answered. “I’m sorry.”

“That?” He shook his head, smiling in spite of himself. “That ain’t nothing. I can take a hit.” It wasn’t like she could hurt him that much with that. Not like the words could.

“I know you can, that don’t mean you should.” She drew in a shaky-sounding breath, almost as if she was struggling to not cry. “Folk that love you shouldn’t hit you, I think. Not ever. Your jackass father may have made you think you deserved it, but...”

He flinched, not from her words, but the way it pressed on another bruise of sorts. No, she wasn’t wrong. His upbringing was a disaster. “Can’t change things,” he said softly. “I suppose if this was a story, it’d be enough that we got love. You’d be the princess that goes off and changes a beast to a prince. Happy ending, forever. But this ain’t no fairy tale.”

“Hey, I rescued you, so don’t that make you the princess?” She gave a watery-sounding chuckle. “I’d have qualified as a beast anyway.” He closed his eyes again, something in him aching at the dull sound of shame and resignation in her words. “It’s--Arthur, we been happy. But you was ready to run away thinking that was best? Like you’re still worried this ain’t real.”

“It ain’t you. It’s me. I know it’s real.” Now that she was here, and things settled again, the panic about it felt foolish, but it had been there. “But I had enough people tell me I wasn’t nothing that it stuck. Sometimes it’s like something takes over my mind and I don’t believe it’s real, you and me. I can’t, until I come back to myself.”

She went quiet for a minute there. “There’s times I don’t sleep when we’re out alone, away from people. Or when I gotta check the lock on the door, or that Dusty’s OK and could let us know if something’s amiss. I know it ain’t like that night.” He understood what she meant--the night the O’Driscolls broke into that isolated cabin, and why feeling safe while she slept was a harder thing for her. “But sometimes I don’t know it. I guess minds get scars too.”

“We got our share, I’m afraid.”

“Don’t mean we can’t be happy.” That rough edge was back in her voice. “The bounty hunting. It--I don’t want to go chase down bastards just for fun, all right? But I’m at my wit’s end trying to come up with something for us to do, all right? And it’s good money for doing a good thing. Making other people safer. Ain’t like we don’t got the skills for it.”

“Sure, it’s easy money, and we’re a pair of hunters and killers. He sighed, grip on her easing, rubbing her back idly with one hand. “I ain’t saying it’s no good answer. But I don’t want to live that as our lives.”

“Why?”

“You wasn’t with us for the good times, though. That’s the trouble. The money was there and we told ourselves we was fighting against bad men by it, so there was never a reason to be anything different from a thief. You get easy money together with the pretense of a cause, you’re never gonna escape that life.” He sighed, patting her on the back gently. “And before you know it, there we are, two hard-eyed bastards always gone chasing down bad men and it’s never gonna _stop_ , you see? We let ourselves wander too far down that road, our kids are gonna grow up with someone else raising them while we’re chasing money and a cause and saying we’re doing right by them by providing. I know it.”

“Arthur…”

“Isaac cried sometimes when I left.” He heard the plaintive note in his voice at it, and the shame even now. “Begging me to stay. But I always left, telling myself I was doing what I had to do to provide for him. Chasing my supposed Goddamn cause too. Your cause is a good one, yeah, but Sadie, I don’t need to get lost in a cause. Don’t ever want to be a man again who sees his kids once in a blue moon by calling other things more important.” He couldn’t resist reminding her of her own words. “I know Danny ain’t Isaac. But I learned some hard lessons from failing Isaac all the same.”

“I learned some hard lessons too. We got kids now, Arthur. It makes me afraid for Bea and Mattie, seeing them posters, knowing the sort that are out there. I can fight. The things that got done to me, who it turned me into, made sure of that. Anyone tries to hurt our babies, I damn well will kill them. But maybe you ain’t wrong, me being too eager to chase them. I can’t kill or capture every monster out there.“ She pushed back from him, but gently so, and after they’d let go, she reached down and took his hand in the lantern light. “And you ain’t one of them. The things you done were terrible. But you’re still trying to forgive yourself.”

“Maybe I don’t deserve that either.” The law certainly claimed he was forever a man unforgiven.

“There’s a difference in holding yourself to account, and flat out refusing to forgive yourself.” She squeezed his hand in hers. “You ain’t the man that rode up to my cabin that night. Not even who you was a few years ago. You used to think you had to balance the scales and earn the right to a peaceful life.”

“I still ain’t sure I earned it. There’s the chance I never shall. But I owe Bea and Mattie a peaceful life, nonetheless.” He looked her in the eyes now, moved to honesty. “I want to be different. Want there to be more in me besides violent men, whether it’s being one or hunting them. You lived a good life before you turned outlaw. You know in your bones you can be something different again. Me? I’m turning forty-one in a few days, Sadie, and I ain’t never been anything but a thief and a killer and a gunslinger. And seems sometimes like the world don’t want to let me be.”

She sighed, reaching up with her free hand and brushing hair out of her face from where it had come loose from her braid. “The thing is, farming’s a life _you_ don’t know. You say it like we get money to get a place and all our problems vanish. Farming’s a money pit, especially early. Always some unexpected expense. Most folk live on the edge of disaster. A few bad years and that’s it. Even a man like Drew with a fine place is in debt. If we want to give Bea and Mattie more than my folks gave me, a hard life and a bad farm, we gotta find a way to make money, or take a loan and pray it goes our way.”

“You really want to do that?” If that was what it took, he’d do it.

“Not particularly. I’m leery yet of all that. Jake and me rolled the dice and lost.”

“I shouldn’t have said that about Jake. I know you…” She’d loved the man with all her heart and soul, and sometimes it was hard to know he had to live up to the example of a dead saint.

“He wasn’t perfect. And I suppose it ain’t fair I expected you to not be pissed about having to take on his debts, or that I didn’t know about it.” She gave another sigh. “I don’t expect you to be him. He wasn’t better than you, Arthur, he was just different. But you’re honest with me. You don’t try to--growing up like we done, him being five years older, I think some part of Jake always saw me as a girl he had to protect.”

“No, I got over that notion real quick when I figured out I needed to protect Pearson from _you_.” It felt good to laugh with her, a soothing balm laid over some of the fear and raw spots they’d opened up between them. “And no, I figured out I’d loved Eliza a while ago. I just didn’t...seemed like something you don’t say to your wife.”

“Why? You know I loved Jake.” She reached up and touched his cheek. “I expect she loved you. Trust another woman’s intuition. Doubt she kept letting you come back just cause you helped support Isaac. The woman let you sleep in her house for days on end, you said. You spent time together. With what a bad start it got, you both was just too afraid to see it, let alone say something and ask for more than you had. Chances are when Isaac got older it’d have pushed you both to speak up or walk away entirely, but it never got there.” 

It hurt to hear it, but in some ways it was a good kind of pain. It framed it into something that felt purer and kinder than the morass of guilt and penance and regret he’d lived in, assuming Eliza politely put up with him because he paid for his son’s time. “I get quick to assume folk are tolerating me,” he admitted softly. “And that I didn’t belong there. But it kept getting harder and harder every time to ride away from Isaac. And her.” He could have belonged in that cabin, if he’d had the courage and the confidence to ask for that life. Eliza had been too frightened as well, probably thinking after she’d hastily dismissed him as an outlaw not fit to marry that she had no right to ask for him to offer that life again. _We was just a couple of scared kids who missed our chance, Eliza, that was all._ “It was just...easier once they was gone to tell myself it was Mary all along.” 

She kept her hand on his cheek, eyes holding his again, and he sensed what she had to say next was something with great weight to it. “You gotta be able to let Danny go, honey. If Karen’s lucky, she’ll have a chance to leave someday and live her own life.”

“I know that.” He heard the crack in his voice all the same. “He ain’t Isaac, Sadie. And he ain’t mine. But I love that boy, and it’s gonna hurt like hell. Same as it did with Jack.” He wished he could have said a better goodbye there.

“Jack’s all right, wherever he is. And what you done for him, and John and Abigail, you loved him. I think he’ll remember that. Whenever Danny has to go, you can say you loved him too.” She let her hand down, gave him a kind, almost sad little smile. “You love so damn much. Keep trying to spare everyone else from hurting. But sometimes we gotta take our own pain, honey, or we don’t grow by it.” 

He had the sensation of something like putting a foot on a rickety bridge, praying it would hold his weight. “Am I really that terrible with the kids?”

“You ain’t ‘terrible’, it’s only that you’re...I think you’re so afraid to make Bea feel bad about anything you don’t hold her responsible.” 

“I just want them to know they’re safe. That I love them.”

“I know. You didn’t have that. But giving them some boundaries so they grow up all right is love too. Hosea and you both said when he found you, you was a wild and angry boy. You wasn’t anything like that by the time I met you. So I bet he gave you some rules.”

“Him and Dutch both, yeah.”

“Let’s leave Dutch’s messed-up ideas of parenting out of this,” she said, and he heard the simmering anger in her voice that always seemed to be there whenever she spoke of Dutch and him. Strangely comforting to know she got angry for him, and how he’d been used.

“Yeah, Hosea did.” He tried to think back now on some of it, Hosea’s patiently explaining things, holding him accountable, but through it all, there was the growing warmth of knowing Hosea cared enough to make sure he was safe, that he became someone worthwhile. 

“He did, and he helped bring out the best in you by it.” She gave him a bit of a cheeky smile. “Gotta train a horse, don’t you? And sometimes corral it a bit to keep it safe?”

He couldn’t help but smile at that, amused by the whimsy of that particular comparison. “You comparing our baby girl to a horse?”

“Come on, she’d love to be a filly,” Sadie teased, and he couldn’t resist laughing with her at that. After the laughter died down, she sobered. “So what should we do? We gotta find something soon.”

“I don’t know.” He shook his head, frustrated at the feeling of no way out, feeling that tug of anxious panic again. “We both got pulled through the sawmill enough for tonight. Let’s say we can let that bide a while.” Sensing her protest, he hurried to say, “Look, we pulled up a few years’ worth of the toughest shit all at once. There’s a lot we gotta get settled, and some of that’s more within reach.”

She slanted him a look of annoyed disapproval. “Fixing the sink first when the roof’s leaking don’t seem wisest.”

“On that, we’re gonna disagree. Sometimes you fix the sink first because it’s just easier to handle when you’re tired. And then it’s one thing off the list.” He gave her a look of his own. “I expect some things never got done around the farm because you was always waiting to tackle the big things first, huh? And it just pissed you off even more getting nowhere. Outlaw life wasn’t the best tutor, but it teaches you this much--sometimes you do the small jobs while you work away at getting to the big one you really need most.”

“Jesus,” she muttered, rubbing her face tiredly. “All right, we try delegating the list your way. But no hiding from the truth, all right? We gotta figure the money out.” 

“Thank you. We deal with some other things first, and we agree we talk about the money thing again next month, and try to come up with some actual ideas before then. Fair?”

“Got yourself a deal.” She reached for the lantern. “Now we’d best get back. It’s late.”

He leaned in and kissed her, quickly and lightly, just a brush of his lips over her cheek. “I do love you.”

She gave him a smile, the lantern light giving her eyes an extra sheen of golden warmth. “Love you too.” As they walked back towards the village, she kept hold of his hand, and the quiet reassurance of that settled over his heart and soul.

Bea and Mattie were fast asleep when they crept into the lodge, dimming the lantern and moving only by the moonlight through the windows. He thought he saw Danny curled up against Karen’s chest, and kept his sigh silent within his mind. Sadie wasn’t wrong. Whether it was while he was a child or once he was a man, he’d have to let Danny go sometime. Sooner rather than later if things went well for Karen, because he knew she wanted more than to depend on him and Sadie for a living. _You deserve a good life too,_ he thought. _A father, if you can find one. Hope you do._ It broke his heart a bit, but she was right. Danny would be OK, no matter what. He would have to tell himself that until he believed it instinctively.

Settling down beside Sadie, pulling the blankets over the two of them, he felt her reach for him in the dark, and he gratefully fell asleep curled up together with her. Glad beyond telling that they’d fought, and brutally so, but the love was far stronger than the anger, and now they knew that for sure. One less thing to fear, wasn’t it?

Dreamed a quiet dream of the New Caledonian woods as they’d likely look in a few months’ time when he and Sadie planned to leave--bronze and copper and scarlet leaves falling, the grass gone to a pale gold in that time before it went brown. There was that buck deer again, the one Rains Fall said had come to him rightly, and as he’d dreamed these past years, he had a doe with him. Two little spotted fawns too now, full of life and energy, bouncing around on still-clumsy legs. Autumn in the north, lean times ahead, but somehow that buck looked up at him with that calm serenity in its eyes all the same. That look that seemed to say, as it had ever since that first dream at Clemens Point, _It may not be easy, but everything will be all right in the end._

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Calderón to Arthur** (received on return to Minnewakan)  
Arthur,  
I can’t say it wasn’t sad news to read that you and Sadie have decided for certain that your path lies elsewhere. But given the state of things in Nuevo Paraiso, I don’t blame you. My place is clearly here because I suspect the need for care of the poor, the sick, and others will become even more important, but it’s hard to raise a family in a place becoming worse by the month.

Besides, every child has to leave home eventually. It’s a thing of pride to see them move towards their own life of happiness, even if it comes with loss. I never had that with my Manuel, taken from me as he was, but in every child of the streets I taught who I saw become something new, something more than the world said they should be, I feel that pride. You more than most, because those children never grew older, even as I did. Manuel is forever fifteen, but he wouldn’t have been. My heart knew that. So for as much as I know you and know you think I’ve given you far more than you can ever repay, no such debt exists.

Most of me is given to the bigger needs of the Church but there’s always a part of me that is myself, and I needed you as much as it seems you needed me. I bless Brother Dorkins every day for finding you in St. Denis. I will miss you, but I’ve taken such joy in watching you shape your own life and the fine man you’ve become. 

These medallions are for Saint Christopher, patron saint of travelers. You’ve traveled far, and I don’t mean only on a map, and there’s more to your journey yet. I know you and Sadie don’t put much stock in religion but I ask only that you believe that I believe in them having some power. Give an old woman’s worries some relief as you travel onward. Please wear them, or at least keep them on you, for luck.

I debated Saint Dismas, the Good Thief, but you’ve become far more than that already, haven’t you?

Bless you, _mi hijo_. Find a good life, kiss your children for their abuela, and I hope you and Sadie will please write me still. 

All my love,  
Calderón

(Enclosed: **two small gold St. Christopher medals** )


	39. Minnewakan: A Bright Future Imagined II

The week passed, warm and bright and fine, and he’d watched the start of freckles on Bea’s round cheeks, being as she was out in the sun so much. They’d had to keep her indoors so much in the fierce heat of the desert day--both he and Sadie had some childhood memories of that. Vulnerable as they were, barely more than babies, the heat sapped them far quicker than adults.

They’d gotten so used to the necessity of waiting out the mid-day sun before riding further that it still struck him as odd to be following tracks through the shade of the forest, shaded among the maples and beeches and birches and oaks, at high noon, and nothing thought of it. 

They’d bagged an assortment of small game already, but found few bigger game tracks today, and even Sadie’s hawk-sharp eyes for tracks could make little sense of the muddle of the tracks that crossed and re-crossed and scratched each other out. Glancing out from the woods towards the prairie, he saw nothing foolish enough to be out in the open just now. “It’s noon,” he said, snapping his watch shut and dropping it back into his pocket. “Take a break, huh? Eat something, rest up a little, have a swim. Then we can see if we spy anything on the way back.”

She nodded at that, swinging down from the saddle, turning Bob loose, and he followed suit with Buell. The two horses wandered down the hill, out of the trees and into the knee-high grass of the prairie, lowering their heads to begin to graze. Lunch consisted of some oat biscuits, venison jerky, and dried serviceberries and chokecherries. A plain and unpretentious meal, and they’d adopted more of the local custom of dried rather than canned fare. Admittedly, it felt far better than some of the canned rations he’d eaten in his day. If he never ate cold canned beans again, he wouldn’t count himself terribly forlorn for it.

Sitting there on the hillside with Sadie, passing the pouches of jerky and berries back and forth, and the tin of biscuits, he looked out over to the west and the woodlands yielding to a vast stretch of prairie, the small lake and the stream that he assumed connected to Spirit Lake.

Sadie must have had some similar thoughts, because she said softly, “Fine place, ain’t it? Nye says government’s advertising moving west hard. ‘The Last Best West’, they’re saying. They still got land here the likes of which ain’t been seen America in probably fifteen years now. The best of it was being snapped up when we was only kids.” She nodded out into the distance. “Jake and me would have given our eyeteeth for land like this. But it was all long gone.”

“Funny thing.” He managed a smile. “All them years Dutch was chasing this dream of us finding unspoiled lands in the west. We was in Washington, Montana, the Dakotas. Never came into Canada. Guess we was looking in the wrong country.”

“Well, Canada was sure as shit closer than Tahiti. You think he wanted that, for real?”

“I don’t know.” He rolled the berries around in his palm, thumbing a couple up and popping them in his mouth. “There’s a lot about Dutch I’m never gonna know for sure.” It still struck him with a pang sometimes to wonder if there had ever been anything real alongside the ego and appetite and deepening mania, if there had been genuine affection. Had Dutch ever cared about him, alongside seeing him as an asset to be constantly shaped and contained? It felt like there had been _something_ , something real, even as twisted as that so-called love had been in the end. Dutch hadn’t been like Colm. He’d taken in a fourteen-year-old brat and put that many years into him, and Arthur couldn’t think it was only out of the hope he’d somehow prove useful. That made the ache and the pain of it all the worse than if he could have simply called Dutch a manipulative bastard from start to finish. “When you’re a kid you think you’re gonna grow up and know it all, have it all make sense, just about. But it ain’t so simple as that. Sometimes you’re never gonna find answers, and you gotta live with that.”

“You said ‘Dutch’s dream.’ And yours?”

He looked again, drinking in the sight of it, unable to help but say wistfully. “A place like this? It’s a fine dream, but it’s gotta be far more than we could afford.”

“Maybe.” She sighed. “Though at least it ain’t like Mexico with the _rancheros_ and _hidalgos_ already owning everything.” They’d asked about land in Nuevo Paraiso, just in case. The price had about made them choke.

He couldn’t resist a laugh. “It’s a tamer west than I remember. Them well-mannered Mounties and all. Government’s more hands on here. It was a lot more rough-and-tumble in America.”

“No getting away from the government entirely,” she pointed out, shoving the lid of the biscuit tin closed. “You and me both have made that mistake. It’s the way it is.” She looked over at him, lifting her chin towards the expanse of land. “Maybe we ask in Banner. See how much a plot like this would be.”

“We could, but do we need another disappointment?” It was bluntly put, but it was about as honest as it needed to be. “We had a hard year already, Sadie. We need something real, not a fantasy we ain’t ever gonna be able to afford, short of ten thousand dollars falling right into our laps.”

“I know.” She looked up, into the trees. “But maybe it’s worth asking. If the government’s encouraging settlement, land might be cheap. And it’s land worth _having_ , Arthur. Sure, we was talking about South America, but seems like that wasn’t us wanting to go there so much as to just have somewhere to run to and it sounded good.” 

So maybe there was a part of him that was Dutch’s son after all, and it hit him with a strange twinge to realize it. “Well, Peru’s a bit closer than Tahiti anyhow,” he couldn’t resist the joke. But then he looked at it seriously. “My whole life, it’s been living in a place while I needed to be there, until that ran its course. Even in Chuparosa.” He reached out, putting an arm around her shoulders. “There’s good folk there. Wish we could do more for them. But it’s rough, and getting rougher. I want more for the kids than that. More for you and me than that.” 

Quiet, peaceful land, and a quiet, peaceful life. It still seemed too good to be true, trying to imagine that being something he could call his own. “There’s folk here we can help,” she said, leaning into his embrace a bit. “People we care about. Rains Fall did say we could stay.”

“I know.” They could stay in that cabin in Minnewakan, for good, and as it had been five years ago, that life was tempting--to be needed, to be able to help good people who could use it. But things were different from the sheer desperation of five years back. “But we got opportunities that they don’t. We can live a life in ways they ain’t allowed. This was Indian land. We ain’t gonna forget that like most do. If we’re gonna live on it, feels like we should be in a position to help them by our being there, not asking to live on the reserve off their kindness when they already got so little.” It would feel like giving up in a way--not only on themselves, but on what help and kindness they could give the Hehakaton and others if they only could push a bit more, fought harder to get there.

She nodded at that, her fingers lightly gripping his shirt. “So, here in New Caledonia, this a place you would want to stay? Don’t think about what’s possible or practical or whatever--just answer me that.” It felt like after they’d torn each other up so badly a few weeks ago, some things came more easily to both of them when it came to discussions. They’d faced down some fears and some problems already, and that had made the talking easier. He only felt stupid now that they’d kept it bottled up so much that it came out in such ugliness and harsh anger. Disagreeing or even fighting was one thing, it would always happen, but he thought that evening in the woods of no holds barred attacks on each other had scared both of them enough that they’d both prefer to avoid a repeat of it in the future.

He had to answer her honestly, and as she asked, not pausing to think about the plausibility, the details, the reality. He said only what he felt in his heart. “This here is about as fine a place as I can imagine.” It felt like something from a dream, the one he’d always had but never allowed himself to truly imagine.

“I agree. It’s real, Arthur. It’s what we wanted, right here in front of us.” She put out a hand, sweeping it to indicate the view in front of them. “Something to work towards, if it comes to it. Ain’t it worth finding out if we can _have_ it rather than giving up, running away, and chasing some other faint notion of something? Jake and me took that Ambarino land sight unseen cause it was what we could have. Said we’d make it work. We took the house in Chuparosa cause it was what we could afford. Said we’d make it work. I’m mighty tired of just trying to make things work, Arthur.”

She asked him to find the courage to try, the courage to hope boldly, recklessly, in more than the vague _someday we’re gonna have our own place_ dreams that they’d always had. Trying to actually seize destiny for once rather than responding to pressure, like a fox being chased by a hunter, felt strange. But it didn’t feel wrong. “I reckon the worst that happens is we find out it ain’t meant to be.” They’d be no worse off for it, in truth. “We able to find out in Banner?”

“Probably. The mayor’s office was next to the Mountie post. Next time we head into town, we ask.” A wild excitement filled his chest at that, heart beating faster, and even as his instincts cautioned him against getting his hopes up too much, that of course it wouldn’t work out because the world knew better than to give such goodness to the likes of him, he couldn’t help but start to imagine. If nothing else, she was right. Seeing this land right there in front of them made the possibility all the more real rather than some nebulous concept of South America or anywhere else. Horses--they could get some fine horses, he was sure, and if people were rushing to settle out here, they’d need horses. 

After a while, shedding their clothes, they took a dip in the lake. It had become a habit to go for a swim where possible now that it was high summer, and there were plenty of lakes and small ponds dotting the countryside, and of course the reserve itself had some shorefront onto massive Spirit Lake. Watching Sadie swim through the water, seeing that compared to the few opportunities in her life she’d had before this, she moved sleek and confident as an otter now, he couldn’t help but smile.

Treading water, she looked over at him, obviously seeing his expression. “What you smiling at there, mister?”

“Just thinking there was a time you didn’t know how to swim, and look at you now.” The water felt good, cool and clear, and it would be too cold to swim in a few months, but for now, it was a fine thing.

She swam closer, looking at him thoughtfully. “Time was you didn’t know much about loving neither. And look at you now.” Those honey-hazel eyes were filled with a soft kind of sweetness. “We got a good start that day, didn’t we? On both counts.”

“We did.” It felt strangely satisfying even now to think she’d taught him something in kind, though he would always think he came out far ahead on that deal. He’d only taught her to swim. What she’d taught him, the gift she’d given him with the sheer sweetness of the physical intimacy between them, was something far deeper and more valuable than that. 

“You surprised me a bit,” she admitted. “I expected--well, I didn’t expect you to just offer that, in broad daylight, out in the open.”

“I was offering a swimming lesson, that was all. Anything else was up to you.” He gave a half shrug, though it wasn’t much of a motion against the swimming. “It was...easier, in some ways, than waiting until we got home. I was used to stripping off outdoors to go swim, or bathe. I could pretend a bit, you see?” Whereas if they’d gotten home, alone in that bedroom with her, there could be no pretense of anything but what it was. “I’d have probably been a damn wreck that night.”

“I don’t think so. You’re braver than you think.” She came closer, caught his arm with her hand, pressing a kiss to his shoulder as she passed. “I had my plans after we got home, you know.”

He turned after her, heading for shore as she did. “Did you now?”

“Yeah. After all that desert riding, we’d likely want to wash up before bed anyway.” A hint of humor, and what he now knew full well to be mischievous suggestion, colored her tone. “I was gonna suggest we help each other with that. Make it...easier.” He understood, able to imagine it now. Easing each other into the strange newness of the situation, each other’s bodies, with the context of bathing. Much the same as what he’d tried to do, giving something else to focus on other than the stark reality of sex, until the fears and nervousness lessened.

“Clever gal.” He couldn’t help but smile as they got to shore, climbing out onto the grass, stretching out under the summer sun to dry off. The faint breeze on his skin felt wonderful. “We got to do that the next night anyway.”

“Reversed the order a bit. First we got frisky, then we cleaned up.” They’d barely made it upstairs after getting home before the clothes came off again, but that night, she’d indeed suggested helping each other wash. “But I put enough thought into that notion. Seemed a shame to let it go to waste.”

“No complaints,” he said, reaching out, finding her hand with his, twining his fingers with hers as they lay there peacefully for a few minutes.

The worries were still there, the reality of things, but it all felt more muted as they rode back to Minnewakan. Perhaps it was only that he was learning better how to bear all of it, and work with her. He’d felt so much like he’d leaned on her to excess at Las Hermanas, and then the early months in Chuparosa, clueless as to how to live a simple, ordinary life. Had he drawn back too far this year, determined to figure it out himself and not be a burden? Probably. Seemed she’d done the same. But they’d come together now and they’d face it together. See if a piece of land like this could be theirs. As they headed back through the woods, he turned in the saddle one last time, taking another glance, trying to fix that location in his mind related to the map in his saddlebag. Nobody lived there--yet. No fences or the like indicating it was anyone’s pastureland. Maybe with any luck, it was available and for sale for less than a king’s ransom. As much as some part of him felt it foolish and reckless, he couldn’t help but hope. She was right. This was more than some vague notion, or chasing what they could get. This was something real. He nudged Buell onward, back towards the reserve.

Though all the soft and excited thoughts got pushed right out of his head when they got back, and found Felipe switching his saddle from Corazon to another horse, and Bright Waters already having swapped over from Chanska. “You wasn’t due back for another couple of days,” Sadie said. He’d been up to Rainbow Lake, and was supposed to check in at Minnehanweton, and Bright Waters with him--she’d gotten what amounted to a permanent pass from Frazier to travel as Felipe’s assistant and nurse. “What happened?”

Felipe glanced up, dark hazel eyes tired and ringed with sleeplessness. “Diphtheria at Rainbow Lake and Minnehanweton,” he answered. “It’s here too. Someone must have had it at Dominion Day, and that let it spread like wildfire to all three communities when they gathered together. I didn’t see anyone, but I was so busy checking over people in general, especially the children. And whoever had it may not have even known it then.” 

“Shit,” Arthur said. Something in his chest seized for a moment. He’d never had diphtheria himself, but he’d heard plenty. Coughing, wheezing, another way to suffocate to death, a strange greyish membrane from the infection filling the throat and slowly choking off the air. Children died from it often enough, but it killed its share of adults too. “Is there something that can be done?”

“I left them with what care instructions I could. There’s antitoxin.” Felipe sighed, rubbing a tired arm over his eyes. “I ordered it when I got here. Picked it up on that first supply run. But when I got here and opened the crates, the entire supply I got is expired. I expect for Indians, they didn’t make much priority.”

“Of course not,” Bright Waters said, and the dull exhaustion in her voice at it said everything. That was normal.

“The nearest good supply is in Queensbury.” The capital was the better part of a day’s ride, nestled into the far southeastern corner of the province along the Mackenzie River. “I was about to go, along with Bright Waters--”

“We’ll go,” Arthur broke in, shaking his head and holding up a hand to tell Felipe to stop there. “You’re the doctor, better you’re taking care of folk than acting as courier.”

“Dawn Approaches came with us,” Bright Waters said. “He’s a better shot than me and all.”

“He could get arrested for riding out without a pass,” Sadie pointed out.

“He don’t give a shit,” Bright Waters answered her dryly. “He’ll ride back soon enough, though. They need him back home.”

Felipe leaned closer, glanced at Arthur, lowering his voice. “Danny and Karen have it. They started coughing a few hours ago.”

His heart suddenly pounded at that, and a sick feeling welled up inside of him. “They gonna--”

“I don’t know,” Felipe answered, anticipating the question. “But it’s best you go. You’re strong again, but I don’t think I’d like to see what happens if you survive diphtheria. The last thing you need is another respiratory disease.” He caught Arthur’s shoulder with his hand, holding on hard for a moment.

“Bea and Mattie?” he asked, feeling the struggle still to form words. 

“They’re all right.” _For now._ Danny, and Karen, both sick. Maybe dying. Could he--God. And leaving his own children here to boot? He’d left Eliza and Isaac, and they’d died. How the hell could he ride away now from a little boy and a sister he loved, and two children of his own, and risk coming home to more graves? Knowing they’d died, and died without him there? He’d barely been able to leave Bea and Mattie overnight so he and Sadie could go have a nice anniversary idyll in Escalera, and they hadn’t been in danger of dying then. How could he leave anyway, saying it was because his TB made him more at risk if he caught diphtheria besides? Wasn’t that the coward’s way out? 

“Let me talk to him,” Sadie said, tugging Arthur aside, obviously seeing something of the paralyzed agony in him. Whether it was obvious to everyone or she simply knew him that well, he couldn’t say, but he was grateful for it.

He turned to her. “I can’t--” he choked out. “They might die, you know?”

She caught his fingers in hers, her grip hard enough to almost hurt. “Felipe’s right. You get sick, that’s dangerous. And the best thing we can do for everyone on the reserves is to go. We can ride to Queensbury without problems.” Her eyes held his, demanding his attention. “Nobody will think less of us for going. We ain’t running. You ain’t going cause you don’t care enough. That’s what we wanted, ain’t it? To use what advantages we got to help. You got smallpox vaccines for this tribe once. Now you’re helping them again.”

The moment held for what seemed an eternity, and then he nodded, feeling some of the overwhelming pressure drain from him, though the fear remained. With the clarity came a certain calm, and the focus to run through what was needed to get the job done. He took a deep breath, and let go of her hand. It was late afternoon already. They needed to go soon if they’d make it to Queensbury by dawn. “Bob and Buell are fresh enough to make the run, and we’re gonna want horses we can trust if we’re riding in the dark. Get the game offloaded to Many Winters. I’ll get our things.”

She nodded at that, turning already, and he headed for the cabin. Bright Waters caught up to him before he could go. “My father--Rains Fall--will make certain your children are cared for,” she told him. “They’re with him and my mother already after Felipe brought down the quarantine.”

He looked at her, a little surprised that she’d come to think of the old man as her father given he’d married Stands Fast well into her adulthood, but that didn’t matter, did it? She nodded at something in his expression. “He’s a great man. One with a gentle heart. I’m his daughter now. He cares for you and Charles as sons,” she explained softly. “He takes your children in as his children of his son. And we’re both doing what we need. I’m helping Felipe. And you’ll be getting the medicine we need.”

“Charles?” he asked.

She looked over towards Charles’ cabin. “He’s where he needs to be. He’s caring for Karen and Danny.” She looked him in the eyes. “You didn’t see him when Felipe told him. Like he’d been shot.”

So maybe Charles cared for them far more than he thought, or had believed he could. Arthur could relate to that. He hadn’t imagined caring for Isaac, or Eliza, as he had realized only too late. He’d taken it too casually, never seeing a moment come where the choice would no longer be there. Maybe Charles would get the chance he hadn’t, though crisis was a damn harsh way to be pushed into realization. He looked at the cabin for another moment, then back at her. “He’s doing what he needs,” he agreed. Everything in balance--sometimes personal needs had to come before the big picture. Charles had lived for the tribe for years. Time for him to take care of himself and those he very likely loved. 

Heading into the cabin and stuffing a few things into the saddlebags slung over his shoulder, grabbing their jackets against the possible cool of the night, he pushed the cabin door closed. He looked to the spot near the broad oak tree where the children usually played, watched by various adults of the tribe. Eerily silent now, all those children cloistered away with their parents, or safe in homes without illness if their parents were sick. The village felt like a ghost town. The quiet felt unnerving, and just for a moment, he thought he saw that dapper, dark figure in his top hat slinking around a cabin. Another moment, and there was the bony, antlered figure of the hungry wendigo. 

“Not today, you fuckers,” he said in a harsh whisper. He debated if he should go say goodbye to Bea and Mattie first. But if he did, he might not be able to leave. He would trust that Stands Fast and Rains Fall would take care of them, soothe them tonight when they wondered where he and Sadie had gone when bedtime came, left in the care of people who were still somewhat strangers to them. He would see them again tomorrow, and make it up to them. Heart aching all the same, he walked away, still trying to not feel like he was failing them, and Danny and Karen, in some way. 

Felipe caught up with them as they headed for the road. “Here.” He handed them a sheet of paper, and a thick wad of cash. “This is an authorization note to show in Queensbury since neither of you is a doctor. Money to pay for the medicine. Stop in Banner and telegraph ahead--there’s a fellow I know there who may be able to get in and get the medicine for you. Save you some time. I’ve written the directions and the message on the note.”

Five minutes later, they were tearing down the road towards the east, the unearthly quiet of Minnewakan fading already behind them. After that, the sound of a coyote yipping somewhere in the woods, even the whine of a mosquito as he reached up to slap it off his cheek, felt oddly welcome.

~~~~~~~~~~

They made good time to Banner, by now the road familiar from their regular runs to town. Stopping in at the train station, Nye asked, “Mail pick up as usual? No supplies. Not until next month.”

“No,” Arthur said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out Felipe’s note. “We gotta send an urgent telegram to Queensbury.”

As Nye read the note, his blue-grey eyes went wide. ”Shit.”

“Shit indeed,” Arthur replied.

Nye turned to the telegraph key. “Is there a train coming anytime soon headed that way?” Sadie asked. They’d come through Crossing Creek to the west themselves, but of course Queensbury, as the capital, had rail laid here to Banner. It would spare Bob and Buell. They couldn’t gallop all the way there and back.

“No,” Nye answered, not even looking over his shoulder as he clicked the telegraph key. “It’s near eight in the evening already. All the passenger trains for Queensbury left by five, to get back before it’s too deep into the night. Nothing at all until ten, and that’s the overnight cargo train. It’s gonna stop regularly. You’d be faster off riding.”

“Shit indeed,” Sadie said under her breath, frustrated at that.

“For the way back, there’s an express at 8 AM, Queensbury to Banner,” Nye went on. “Folks need to go to the capital sometimes, and that gets them back here quick the next morning after their business. You might want to catch that.”

“All right.” 

He shoved Felipe’s note back under the grate of the teller window. “I’ve got the message sent. You want to wait on a reply?”

“No.” She took the note, tucking it away herself this time. 

“Good luck.”

Banner faded behind them, dusk at their backs as they rode onward, the edge of the prairie and the southern tip of Spirit Lake soon receding too into the rapidly greying light. Then there was only the endless, rolling woodlands. She’d have been scared of it before Ambarino, used as she was to the open vistas of the desert, but she’d been out in the mountain forests. The sounds she heard were only animals, and the howl of wolves only made Bob go faster as she gripped his sides even tighter, urging him on.

Lights here and there in the distance, cabins and small holdings here in the woods, and soon even those faded as it seemed the world was in bed except for the two of them. Pausing finally to light lanterns and tie them to the horse’s saddles, they pushed onward. Cycling Buell and Bob’s paces, letting them walk or trot some to rest, because even the best, bravest, and strongest horse could only gallop so much, and in thick forest like this besides, that was foolishness.

Walking the horses a little while through another small village, even the crookedly constructed saloon shuttered, she finally broached the subject with Arthur. “You gonna be all right?”

He gathered the reins in one hand, reaching for his canteen with the other, taking a moment to answer. “Not if they ain’t all right.” He said it with blunt honesty.

She had expected that. “If something happens--that ain’t your fault.”

“I know.” He looked over at her, green eyes shadowed in the lantern light beneath the brim of his hat. “All the same, I’ll blame myself.”

“Charles is there with them,” she said. “Bright Waters told me.” She somehow hadn’t been surprised to hear that the big man had sequestered himself away with Karen and Danny, insisting on caring for them. So he’d found his heart after all, when challenged with what mattered. She’d been tested by the cholera, and she’d chosen to stay. She wouldn’t exactly recommend it as a choice method of figuring things out, however. Though maybe for stubborn fools like her, and Charles, nothing else would get through.

“He’ll take care of Danny and Karen. I meant Bea or Mattie,” he said, voice going soft, all gruff and uncertain. “If they die, and I wasn’t there…” He gave a soft cough that she suspected might be covering a small sound of pain. “I rode away more than once, Sadie, and I had a son there waiting for me. And one time I came back and suddenly I didn’t. I wonder still. If he was calling for me.”

There was nothing much to say to that. He had reason to be afraid, given how he’d suffered. It was the same as her need for locked doors to sleep behind whenever possible. She’d seen the low levels of anxiousness in him when they’d gone to Escalera that one night. True, she’d wanted to get home too, but it had been like an actual fear from him. The nights here in Minnewakan had been different, being as they kids were only a few hundred feet away in Charles’ cabin. Leaving their children behind and riding away from them--God, that probably fed into his insistence when it came to not turning bounty hunter full time. She knew nothing she could tell him would alleviate that doubt, that rising fear. Only getting back, and seeing Bea and Mattie alive and well, could help quell that feeling. This was his fear to face, but he didn’t have to do it alone. “Then let’s get to Queensbury quick as we can,” she said, pulling Bob alongside Buell, leaning over for just a moment and putting a hand on his knee in reassurance.

After a while she wondered if they were going in circles, because the view all seemed the same. But every time they consulted the map in the glow of the lantern, every signpost on the roads, reassured them that they were headed the right way. The names of the hamlets and villages kept changing. Violet’s Rest. Raven Creek. Rising Sun House. Seeing the last one lit up by lanterns even in the last of the night, seeing drawn curtains, and hearing the sound of male and female laughter and what sounded like a gramophone cranking away within as they passed close by, Arthur shot her a bit of a smirk. “Told you years back that kind of thing was a brothel name.”

Even after the gang and all of it, she’d still been an innocent about some things, even then. “So long as the name’s the only familiarity you’re keeping with brothels,” she said, glad to see him able to crack a joke at least, to break some of the unbearable tension of their ride. “I ain’t looking down on those women, mind, but…”

He gave her a small smile. “You know I don’t want nobody else.” He nodded towards the road. “We’re getting close, by the map.” 

Another hour, dawn breaking in front of them, and they reached Queensbury. It looked a bit rough and tumble, put together of disparate parts, which made sense for a place that had become the capital of a province only formally recognized six years ago. Log cabins and flimsy shanties and clapboard houses lining dirt roads with wagon ruts led to some sturdier stone and brick construction and cobblestone streets as they looked south towards the riverfront, the waters of the Mackenzie tinged purple-pink in the glow of the rising sun.

Pulling out Felipe’s note, she read it again hastily, making sure she had it right. “We gotta go see Dr. Jonas Koskinen, on Regina Street.”

Stopping and asking a few people stirring in the morning, working folks by the cut of their clothes headed to their jobs, a young woman with the cracked and chapped hands Sadie would bet anything marked her for a laundress gave them directions. 

Koskinen’s office was in a white two story wood-framed building, the sort Sadie bet marked a man who lived above his offices. Obviously they were expected, because Arthur’s pounding on the door got an answer within about twenty seconds.

“You are the ones Felipe Garcia has sent?” he asked. “Come in.” Koskinen himself looked about fifty, white-blond hair balding and rapidly greying, sporting a truly impressive walrus mustache. He shut the door behind them. “I managed to get into the government offices this morning to get my hands on a great deal antitoxin supply,” he said, giving a smile that showed some charming dimples. “Threat of an epidemic tends to wake people up promptly. I may have misunderstood your message a little and said the sickness was out near Banner. Of course they would likely not respond so briskly for Indians.” He made a face at that. Sadie noticed his lilting, rolling accent, and the very careful English of someone who spoke it as his second tongue.

“Felipe says he knows you,” Arthur said.

“Sure. Brilliant man. Very interested in the future of medicine. We met first at the medical conference in--which one was it? No matter.” Koskinen shrugged. “We tended to talk most every year. I was not aware he’d left Mexico for Canada, though.”

“Things got kinda hectic down there,” Sadie said.

At Koskinen’s questioning look, Arthur cleared his throat. “We was down there too. I was one of Felipe’s TB patients, a few years back.”

“My, and look at you now!” Another of those cheerful smiles, and he eyed Arthur with a sort of delighted interest. “Healthy enough to ride through the night and everything. Artificial pneumothorax, yes? He had said he was implementing this with great success.”

“Yeah, artificial pneumothorax is real wonderful,” Arthur said with a dry edge to his tone. “But begging your pardon, mister--doctor, sorry--we gotta be getting back.”

“Sure, yes, of course, this is not social hour when lives are on the line.” Koskinen waved towards a percolator on the desk, sitting on a wool pad. “Coffee is fresh though, so help yourself while I go get the antitoxin packaged properly. A cardboard box won’t do for that, and I imagine you feel very tired after such a ride.”

The coffee was strong and scalding, but that felt like exactly what she needed at that moment, and sitting down to drink it, she felt herself waking up from the sluggish stupor that started to come over her.

Koskinen came back maybe ten minutes later with two wooden boxes. “Wrapped snug in cotton wool like little nestlings,” he said with a chuckle. “My best wishes to Felipe.” He shook his head. “TB, cholera, diphtheria. With such a mind and passion, he would be a wonderful researcher. But he seems always to need to fling himself right into the middle of these epidemics. It’s who he is, though.” But it sounded like the fond chiding of a friend, not a criticism. Obviously the two knew each other well enough from their annual meetings for Koskinen to have a decent measure of Felipe.

Heading out, clutching the precious cargo, they made their way to the train station just in time to catch the express train back to Banner. Unlike the more direct trails, the train tracks cut westward along the Mackenzie until they hit the prairie--probably to minimize the hassle of cutting railroad through woodlands--and then turned northward. Somewhere among the rolling hills of grassland, she dozed off, feeling Arthur lean into her as well.

_She’d walked along the cliff edge of Horseshoe Overlook more than once, and not for the view. They kept coming and guiding her away, saying she stood too close. The last time, Susan, the vinegar-tongued one who’d been kind enough to give her the tea that scoured any possible remnant of those O’Driscolls out of her womb, had chided, **You’ve had a hard time but you can’t just go wandering around like some mindless fool, miss. Everyone in this camp has to work to eat, do you hear me?**_

_She’d mended a few socks, trying to not think of Jake as she did it, and how holey both their socks had been that last winter. As much darning as wool, in truth. Though these people weren’t much better. Then she’d gone to the cliff again, going to the edge and walking. Half-hoping that she’d slip and lose her balance, but God was no more merciful there than he’d been back in Ambarino._

_Someone came up behind her, and she turned rapidly, startled, frightened at the surprise. Catching herself only with effort, she saw a man. Tall, dark, dapper--for a moment he looked like Dutch, the gang’s leader, but then she saw he wasn’t. There were enough people in this gang of theirs she supposed this could be one that hadn’t been around much the last few weeks. It wasn’t like she’d paid much attention. Dutch dressed flashily enough. Maybe this one was some kind of lieutenant. Like Arthur, the big one, and Hosea, the quiet and sickly one._

_“Careful,” he said, studying her with dark eyes. “Wouldn’t want you to slip, Mrs. Adler, now would we?”_

_“What’s it to you?” she snapped, disgusted to feel her eyes filling with tears, ashamed at the weakness of it._

_“Nothing,” he said with a shrug. “Death claims us all in the end. You seem to be having, well, some doubts.” At her questioning look, he went on, “If you were resolute in your desire to die, your broken body would be at the bottom of this cliff already.”_

_So she was too weak to even kill herself. “So?”_

_“So if you seem determined to continue existence, it seems to me you’d best choose what you want to stay alive for. Love? Revenge? Please. There has to be something finer to existence than mere inertia.” He went to pat her on the shoulder, probably in some kind of reassurance, then held off as he saw her reaction. “Ah, yes, of course. My apologies.” He stood back, bowing his head slightly in contrition._

_In that moment it felt like something kindled within her. She’d had love, and had it taken from her brutally, both Jake and his memory. There was nothing of love left in her after they’d gotten done with her. So that left revenge. Maybe that was all there was left in the world._

She woke with a start, seeing Spirit Lake in the distance, rubbing her eyes and yawning. They had to be approaching Banner. She’d forgotten that moment on the cliffside, because when she’d asked about that nattily dressed lieutenant, Karen and the others looked at her like they wondered if she’d been drinking too much. She’d put him from her mind, figuring she’d been crazy enough to have imagined him.

But he’d been there, hadn’t he, on that clifftop? He’d been there in Armadillo too, leaning over her and waiting to see if she was ready to give up and come with him. He was probably there in Minnewakan right now too, bending over people and watching them fight to live with that same detached interest.

She’d stayed alive at first for revenge. Then she’d stayed alive for love, because she’d loved Arthur even then, bound to the promises they’d made each other back at Beaver Hollow, solemn as their later wedding vows. She knew now why she was alive, but the thought of that odd fellow poking at her at Horseshoe, like prodding an insect with a stick to see which way it would jump, sent a cold shiver down her spine. He’d invited her to choose, and she’d chosen, and it had brought her here in the end. Full circle, from the darkness to the light. Death, they’d thought, because Arthur had seen him too. Death and who knew what else, but some force beyond reckoning, who seemed to like toying with the strings of fate sometimes. _You’d best not be eyeing my children, you cold-eyed bastard._

Getting Bob and Buell unloaded at Banner in a rush, padding the medicine boxes further with their jackets in saddlebags, they headed back to Minnewakan as quickly as they could, the noon sun beating down on them as they rode across the prairie section of the pathway.

Riding in, the village still seemed deserted, but heading towards Felipe’s cabin, they caught Bright Waters hurrying between cabins herself, looking exhausted and drawn, a dark spatter of what looked like blood on her orange calico blouse. “What’s the news?” Sadie asked her.

“You’re back!” she said, eyes shining with relief. “A few have the membrane forming in their throats, but nobody’s truly bad off yet. Danny and Karen included.”

“Thank God,” she heard Arthur mutter softly. 

Bright Waters held her arms out. “Here. Give me the medicine. Felipe will handle people here, then head to Minnehanweton and Rainbow Lake.” 

Arthur handed it over to her carefully. “Is there--”

She looked at Arthur, shaking her head, giving a small smile. “No. Everyone sick is being cared for. Go to my mother’s house and be with your children, _tibló._ It’s where you need to be.”

“How should I call Rains Fall?”

That smile grew a little, fondly amused. “From experience, it would mean a great deal to him for you to call him _Até_.” Then she lifted the boxes of antitoxin. “See you later.”

Heading to Rains Fall and Stand Fast’s cabin, Sadie knocked. Stands Fast opened the door. “We’re back,” Sadie said, realizing even as she said it that it was a crashing statement of the obvious. “We got the medicine. Felipe’s at work as we speak.”

Stands Fast let them in, closing the door behind them. Sadie could hear Rains Fall’s low, gravelly voice telling a story. “Then Iktomi looked up into the sad face of hungry Muskrat and said, ‘We’ll run a race to see who shall have this pot of fish. If I win, it all becomes mine and I won’t share with you. If you win, half of it becomes yours.’ Now remember that this is mean of Iktomi, because we should be kind and share what we have.”

Hearing Bea’s giggle, she stood and watched, heart easing to see Bea healthy and happy, Mattie asleep with his buckskin doll without a care in the world, too young yet to really revel in storytelling and needing a nap anyway. Seeing the look on Rains Fall’s face, the gentleness there. Bright Waters had been alluding to something, and others too. Arthur had told her what Paytah had said, and now she saw it. He’d lost so much. Maybe only how she’d lost the future with those children with Jake made her understand it, because unlike Arthur, she’d never lost a child of her own. Rains Fall was a man made for sitting with grandchildren and telling them stories, and he’d never had that.

Bea finally noticed, and gave a shout, pushing up from the floor and rushing towards them. “Momma, Daddy, you go _away_!” She hugged Sadie’s legs tightly, and it was only with effort she managed to lift her daughter up from there into her arms and hold her close, breathing in the scent of her, feeling the rapid beat of her heart. 

“Sorry, Beanstalk,” Arthur said in a gruff murmur. “But like Rains Falls tells you, sometimes you gotta share what you have. Folk needed us.”

Too young to understand much of it yet, Bea just cuddled closer, clinging tightly, reassured to see her parents back. Mattie still slept, but she’d hug him as tightly as she did Bea once he woke. 

She saw Arthur crossing the cabin to where Rains Fall sat in his chair, watching. He held out his hand. “Thank you. For watching my children. For keeping them safe.” His voice went low and uncertain for a second. “Bright Waters said perhaps I should call you _Até,_ sir. That it’d be proper and respectful. Is that...what you’d want?”

Rains Fall got up, with a little effort. His knees must have been hurting. But he took Arthur’s hand, and then pulled him in tightly, giving him a hug. “Yes. _C‘inkshí._ ” His voice caught for a moment, wavered on the Hehakaton word that Sadie suspected she could translate, but the next word, in English, came out loud and clear. “Son.”

~~~~~~~~~~

**New Caledonia Star, July 6th, 1904**  
 _SHIP OF DEATH DOCKED IN SAN FRANCISCO HARBOR_  
A crime of sickening brutality has landed upon American shores. Several of the crew of the _Shannon’s Ballad_ , a steamer of the Red Anchor Line, were found murdered, including the ship’s purser. The ship had just returned from a sojourn to Australia, leaving the port of Melbourne earlier this year, and dropping anchor in the fair cities of Manila and Honolulu en route.

Other passengers on the ship report that one Michael Burton, an American emigre returning from recent years in Australia, had argued repeatedly with Captain Harold Godfrey, and Captain Godfrey was one of the unfortunate victims of the bloodthirsty attack. Mister Burton also instigated numerous fights with other passengers, and was generally described as an extremely aggressive and unpleasant man. Chief Officer Daniels reports that Captain Godfrey was suspicious, given a man lost at sea en route from Melbourne went missing in strange circumstances, and he owed a gambling debt to Mister Burton, but nothing conclusive could be proven.

The passengers’ personal belongings in the ship’s safe were stolen, and the purser murdered after presumably being forced to open the safe. Other missing items include numerous small and easily portable items of value that were located in the cargo hold, in some cases with their containers broken and splintered by an axe and crowbar in the haste to obtain such loot. Detective Frank Malloy of the police department suspects collusion in this specific knowledge of these valuables, as several members of the ship’s crew remain unaccounted for and are presumed to have joined the fiendish Mister Burton in his plans. However, at least one made it no further than further into the city. 

Burton is also presumably involved in the ghastly slayings of grocer Amos Wright along with his wife and two daughters before absconding from the fair city of San Francisco, given the presence of a broken necklace stolen from the _Shannon’s Ballad_ found in the Wright household alongside the unfortunately slain innocents, and the dead body of a crewman shot in the head in a gruesome spectacle to add to an already quite horrible tableau. Detective Malloy suspects that the Wrights were merely victims of circumstance attacked by a vicious murderer in search of additional money and supplies before his cowardly flight northwest into the mountains. The home and shop were thoroughly ransacked.

Michael Burton is described as mid-forties, of average height, with greying fair hair and a sweeping mustache and beard. Anyone with knowledge of his whereabouts should contact the nearest office of the Pinkerton Detective Agency on behalf of the San Francisco police department.


	40. Minnewakan: All For Ten Dollars

She’d been used to a certain routine as a child, years ago. Saturday night baths in the kitchen in the old tin hip bath, and then getting dressed in their best for Sunday morning to go into town and hear Uncle Will preach. It was a matter of pride. 

Rituals meant a thing. These days, people didn’t don armor, but fine clothes were their own kind of social armor, weren’t they? She’d seen the Hekahaton at their sweat lodge, purifying themselves. Bathing before facing a hard task felt a little like that, all washed clean.  
The one time they’d been all the way to Blackwater, when her father needed to go deal with the bank and they turned it into a family excursion of sorts, they did the same thing. She and Jake did it too, the day they’d sold the farms. Now here she was all those years later, preparing to go once again deal with men who could change destinies with the stroke of a pen and a deed and a map. 

So she prepared for the battle of it. A deliberate readiness--it reminded her of Arthur, and how he’d come back to Beaver Hollow bathed and shaved and barbered, dressed in that fancy outfit of his, prepared with care and ready to die.

She shook her head when Arthur went for those clothes in the trunk, the plum red coat and the rest of it. “Too fancy, Art. Ain’t a big city and we ain’t looking to scam a cattle baron.” She pointed to the indigo vest with the royal blue swirls, the orange tie. Some flair to them, but not too flashy. “We’re respectable settlers,” she said, holding his gaze. “Not dirt poor, but not like fancy folk neither. We’ll get our hands dirty working our own land.”

He nodded at that, pulling out the clothes she’d indicated. “Can play a role well enough if you give it to me.” A faintly amused smirk crossed his lips for a moment. “Though last time I was dealing with the notion of land holdings, Hosea and me was playing investors from Atlanta and looking to scam the hide off some fellas making crooked deals in Blackwater. We wanted to look flashy for that.”

Dressed herself in a fine indigo blue skirt and a deep golden blouse with dark blue trim, she put her hair up neatly, knowing the soft look would appeal more than her practical braid. Ready, she looked over at Arthur, and gave him a nod. “Let’s go.” As they passed by Charles’ cabin, she scooped Mattie up from where Karen and Charles were watching him on the porch. “Give Momma a smile for luck, huh?” He obliged, giving her a big, delighted smile. She held him close for a minute, then kissed him on the forehead.

The wagon ride to Banner was so familiar by now, the turns and ruts and sights known to the point she and Arthur barely had to watch the trail in more than a cursory way. Leaving the wagon near the station, letting Nye know they’d pick up the order this time rather than Charles, they headed down the street. Passing the Mountie outpost, she spied someone new there--looked like Crozier had gotten his reinforcements finally.

Next door stood the bank. She glanced at Arthur, unable to help a wry observation of, “As usual, the land agent’s office is in the bank.”

“Sure. It’s like having a loan shark in a gambling hell.” She heard a flicker of nervousness beneath the gruff humor. He squared up his shoulders. “All right. Might as well face the music.” 

They’d gone back and forth about it so much after the trip to Queensbury, and spent three weeks now avoiding the trip to Banner, since they’d promised they’d ask about land when they were there. They both knew it, even as they went hunting and fishing, drifting back towards that patch of land with the lake, drawn to it like magnets. Daring to dream was fine and good, but she wasn’t sure she could bear the weight of having that door slammed in her face. She’d finally looked at him last night after they put the kids to bed, and said it out loud. “We both lost so much, we got scared to hope. Thought it’d cost us even what little we had. Took a wedding and us getting drunk to find the nerve to admit we wanted to be married for real. Tribe needs a supply run anyway. Let’s just go tomorrow and face it. At least we’ll know.” 

He’d looked over towards a dozing Bea and Mattie, and nodded, though she’d seen the tension in his hands, the nervous flex and fidget of his fingers on the pen as he’d been sitting writing a letter to Pedro and Juanita. “Mary and me had big dreams and never did a thing with them. So did you and Jake. Eliza and me, both of us was too afraid to speak up. Missed our best chances. If this notion fails, at least we know it ain’t cause we held back, and we still got a couple months to keep looking.”

Heading into the bank, she sensed Arthur looking around. “Don’t worry,” he muttered lowly in Spanish, “I ain’t casing the place.” 

She suppressed a laugh. “Excuse me,” she stepped up to the teller, and suppressed a spark of irritation when his eyes skittered right over her like butter on a hot griddle, and went straight to Arthur. Of course they did. She was the little wife, a mere appendage, and he’d do all the talking, wouldn’t he? 

“Can I help you, mister?”

“Yes, you can help my wife and me both,” Arthur said. “Sadie, what was it you was--she knows best.” She hid a smile, knowing what he was doing in forcing the man to deal with her.

“We was hoping to talk to whoever’s handling deeds and land settlement. There’s a particular plot we got our eyes on, and we wanted to inquire.”

The teller’s eyebrows rose. “Well, you’re in luck. Land’s real cheap for settlers right now. That’d be Mr. Landry.” He gestured to Arthur’s gun belt. She felt naked without hers, but she’d known she had to leave it off for this. “However, no weapons, sir, before I let you go into the back.”

“Shit,” Arthur muttered. “I forgot to take them off before we walked in.” He raised his voice. “I ain’t exactly gonna hold the man at gunpoint for a deed. That’s a fool move.” But he unbuckled the belt and handed it over.

Ushered through the steel lattice door to the back, they ended up in the office of C. Landry, according to his door. Whip-thin, spectacled, and bony, he put Sadie in mind of an undertaker, except that there was a warmth in his smile and his eyes that kept him from dolorous gloom. “So, Hank tells me you’re looking for some land?” he said, gesturing them to the chairs after shaking hands in introduction. “Good news, then. Ottawa’s encouraging settlement by offering land very affordably.” 

“How affordable we talking?” She looked at Landry, well aware that a couple of Americans with New Austin accents on the far side of the prime of life needed more explanation than a pair of locals or well-scrubbed eighteen year olds would. “We took advantage of the Homestead Act down in America. Didn’t work out, unfortunately. We put in a few years and was getting the place going pretty well, but then bandits come along, and, well…” 

It hurt sometimes still to realize that the five years she and Jake had to improve the property and own it for good had passed in 1901, the fall that she was pregnant with Bea, and she hadn’t realized it until that was too late. She’d left, hadn’t rebuilt the house. So she didn’t even own the land Jake was buried on. But in the end, that didn’t matter. She couldn’t have made a life there with Arthur, and Jake understood that. She’d gone and said her goodbyes to him and the land.

“Oh, then you’re familiar. There’s actually something fairly similar in force here in Canada, the Dominion Lands Act, though I think you’ve seen the land still on offer here is much better than what was available to you in America.”

“Yeah, all that we could get was poor land in the western Ambarino mountains, which didn’t help.” She sensed Arthur quietly letting her do the talking, recognizing he was out of his depth in the particulars here.

Though he did speak up now. “It’s real fine country here. We been staying with friends a while,” she could almost sense his reluctance to not say exactly who those friends were in case the man looked down on Indians, “and gotta say, we fell in love with the place.” 

“The name’s familiar,” Landry said, sitting back in his chair. “I’ve seen you both around town a fair bit this year. Seems you’d be a fine addition to New Caledonia.” 

“So what’s the details on settlement?” she asked.

Landry looked over at Arthur. “Down to brass tacks, eh? You’ve got a determined missus here.”

“Gotta be, to settle as hard land as we did. Then we ended up living in Mexico for a time, and that ain’t for soft gals neither.”

“Very well.” Rifling through a stack of papers, Landry pulled some out. “You’re both literate folk, I assume?” They nodded. “Good. Then you can read this for yourself too, but it’s a dreadful bore all the same. So I’ll still summarize. This is a contract between you and the Dominion of Canada. You’re entitled to sign, as head of household,” he nodded to Arthur, “to initial claim on a quarter lot. 160 acres, that is. You then have three years to improve the value of the land.”

“It was five years in America,” she protested, nervousness fluttering in her stomach. Two years less made a difference.

“It’s three here.” There was a bit of steel in his voice at that, though it still stayed utterly polite. “The land is far better, given the province was only formally recognized eight years ago and you’d be very much on the early end of settlement, so a shorter window to see improvement is reasonable. Besides, then you own your land all the sooner, don’t you?”

“Same terms for improvement?” she asked. “Permanent home built, starting to cultivate some of the land?” 

“What if we’re looking to primarily ranch, not raise a lot of crops?” Arthur asked. “Though that’s a bit small landwise for ranching.”

“Showing efforts towards a permanent ranching operation is sufficient. And after three years, if you’ve shown sufficient improvement and that’s verified by a Crown land agent, the deed will be formally signed over to you. Once you own your initial quarter lot, you can purchase the rest of that lot--480 acres--for a reduced price. As well as further grazing lands if need be.” He shrugged, tapping the paper with his finger. “You understand the system if you did it in America. Mostly it’s to dissuade land speculators snapping up everything, and promote opportunity for folks who actually want to live here in New Caledonia and make this their home.” 

“Sure,” she answered him. “What’s the initial filing fee?”

“Ten dollars.” 

“Same as America, that.” Auspicious, since it was so little a sum to pay, but the reminder of having sat in that Blackwater office with Jake, handing over their ten dollars, and dreaming of their life together hurt all the same.

Though she heard an odd laugh from Arthur at that. “So little, ain’t it?” he said, and she wondered if she’d imagined that strange note to his laugh, but she didn’t think she had.

“The aim is to make land accessible to hardworking ordinary people, so it’s a wonderful thing, isn’t it? Of course, you’re Americans, so you’d have to obtain British citizenship sometime in the next three years prior to getting your land deed. Or at least you would, Mr. Griffith, as being married to you would confer that status upon your wife.”

She hadn’t thought about that. Shit. Especially given “Arthur Griffith” didn’t exactly exist in any church baptismal records, they’d have to get creative there. The had their marriage certificate, true, but that didn’t prove where he’d been born. Besides, some part of her balked a little at the idea of giving up on being an American. Maybe it was that stubborn notion that they’d fought a damn war to be free of the British, so much like a woman being expected to surrender her independence to a husband, the thought annoyed her. Arthur suddenly leaned forward in his chair, almost vibrating with sudden excited energy, one hand on the desk. “We left when I was two, but I was born in Wales. That do you?” She almost let out a strangled laugh of relief at that--could it really be that easy? 

“If you can produce some kind of record to that effect, certainly.” Shit again. She doubted he did, and it would name him as Arthur Morgan besides. That was another problem. She wondered if maybe Hosea had taught him some forgery skills while he was at it. Not that she’d advocate being dishonest overall, fine, but sometimes a little shaving the corners for an honorable reason that didn’t harm anyone could pass. All they wanted was to make an honest life.

Then she thought of the other problem she could readily imagine. “We gotta live there constantly for three years, I assume?”

“No, but six months of the year at least.”

She hesitated, but then decided timidness wouldn’t serve and pushed on. “Is there any room for, ah, some kindness on that?” She looked at him, deciding to deal as honestly as she could. “Look. Arthur and me, we’ll work hard. We aim to settle here. Raise our kids. But truth, we jousted at that windmill once already with the Homestead Act. The land was cheap but without cash ready to develop it, it’s one hardscrabble life struggling to get going. And we’re just now paying the last of the debts years later, from losing our first farm through no fault of our own. We ain’t the youngest already, sir, and we’ve had some bad luck that’s put off a lot of things until now. We started late. Both got widowed before we met. Lost the Ambarino land. We got young kids now too that need something secure. We can’t struggle for ten years to make a solid farm like real young folk can.”

“We also ain’t inclined to head down the hall to the bank manager and take a loan.” Arthur raised his hands. “No offense meant, mind. But after the experiences we had before, we’d sooner come to this free and clear. There any way we can use some of them three years to go after some business opportunities we got, sell our house in Nuevo Paraiso too, and come back, without having to be here half the year? It’s gonna be hard to find solid work elsewhere with us tied to that.”

Landry chewed his lip thoughtfully, tapping his pen on the desk. “It’s not exactly within the terms of the agreement. But then, most people coming here are brand new to the province. Whereas you’ve been around town, and people speak well of you being helpful and such.” He mulled it over for what felt like an eternity, and Sadie’s heart pounded so loudly in her ears it felt like a wonder both Arthur and Landry couldn’t hear it. “All right. It’s a little unconventional, but I understand your situation. And you seem like good sorts I’d sooner see stick around. I’d be willing to consider an arrangement where the land continues to be held in trust without you here, but it’s on you to move fast when you’ve got the cash. That means by the end of 1907, you’d have to be back here, have a house built, and have livestock. Bringing in stock too late in the year up here is sheer folly, so if you’re back heading into the fall, I’d accept evidence of the capital to buy that stock, and a contract from a supplier stating that you’ve both agreed that in the spring of 1908 a purchase is being made, and on what terms. House,” he held up one finger, “some livestock or proof of purchase,” another finger, “and either the structures such as fences, barns, and the like, or money in hand to build them, to properly support that livestock,” a third finger raised. He glanced at them over the rims of his glasses. “I’d consider those three stipulations fulfilling the terms of the contract and demonstrating your good faith commitment to being citizens of New Caledonia.” He kept the hand held up, those three fingers now almost a warning. “If you don’t come through on any one of those, you have no rights to the land, and you’ll be considered squatters if you try to settle there.” 

“That’s fair,” she said.

“Now, you said you had a specific plot in mind?” He gestured to the map hung on the wall beside the window, New Caledonia carved up into myriad tiny squares, some colored in red, others shaded pale pink. “The red sections are already taken, quarter to full lots--the pink is the rest of that full lot held in reserve for the time being. Black is government and railroad lands and such and unavailable.”

She crossed to the map, Arthur right at her shoulder, scanning it. They’d looked at a map two weeks ago and located that spot, with the lake and forest. Seeing it in the plain off-white of the map, she tapped a finger on it. “This one. Deer Lake, looks like?”

Landry joined them there. “You’re in luck. It’s available.” He beamed at the two of them. “So, are you of a mind to sign papers?”

Suddenly it felt like too much. “Can we think on it a day or so?” she asked. “Get a few things in order, talk about it.” 

He nodded. “Very well. Most folks just coming in don’t have a specific plot in mind and they take it sight unseen. So if anyone comes in, I can try to steer them elsewhere--for a while.” He raised an eyebrow. “That’s a nice location, though. Pasture land, woods for timber, lakefront for watering stock. It’ll go fast.”

“We’ll decide quick enough,” Arthur answered, picking up his hat from where he’d left it on the desk, and heading for the door, opening it for her.

Once they were outside, it was as if they decided to not burst forth with thoughts immediately. Not on something this big. So they went to the station, picked up the supplies, loaded the wagon, and headed back towards the reserve, talking only of small things, nothing so frightening and major as the shape of the future.

It was only after dinner, Bea already tucked in and a story read to her, and Mattie at her breast nuzzling sleepily more than nursing, that she decided to bite the bullet. Handing their dozing son to Arthur to put to bed, buttoning back up, she said, keeping her voice hushed, “We’d best talk about it, don’t you think?” She watched Mattie curl in on himself, and go immediately to sleep. “Gets that from you, don’t he?” she said, trying to put some humor into the moment.

“Seems so,” he answered. He came back to the table and sat there with her, the light of the kerosene lantern casting a warm glow. “You know more about this than me. What’s your thought?”

“It’s good land. It’s everything we want.” She let out a soft, low sigh, reaching for his hand where it lay on the table. “It’s a gamble. We put three years into chasing that, we could lose it and end up starting over once again.” Older, more tired, disappointed yet again.

“True. But you said it--we gotta chase something, and this is real and right here.”

“It’s good land at a good price.”

“It’s so little money to have that much power to change things, ain’t it?” he said, shaking his head, giving her a sad little smile, glancing down at their joined hands. He breathed in deeply, then looked up at her, calmer now, but that glimmer of wistful pain was in his eyes. “I lost one dream I could have had, over ten bucks. A wife. A son. A home. Nice quiet life out in the woods. Feels a bit like a kick in the teeth that I can have this life here, for ten dollars.” His fingers tightened in hers.

She’d forgotten it herself, he’d mentioned it so casually those years ago at the San Luis, but some things burned into the soul as an indelible brand, seared there by loss and agony. That specific figure of ten dollars that Eliza and Isaac had been killed for would never leave him. She stood from her chair, went to him, standing there and reaching out, holding him, finally seeing the jumbled confusion of thoughts and feelings he’d been keeping there since Landry’s office, feeling the tension in his body at it. She kissed the top of his head, then settled down on his knee, keeping her arms around him. “It is a kick in the teeth, I won’t deny it. You lost all your happiness once for ten bucks. This time, you can gain it. So perhaps it’s restitution too.”

“And you?” Sharp as he was, it didn’t surprise her that he made his own leap of logic. “You lost the farm in Ambarino, and Jake too. Ten bucks you two paid for that land right, and lost on it. If you win that gamble this time, and it’s finer land besides, that gonna be your own kind of restitution?”

“I’d say so.” The thought of it soothed some of the old, still aching wounds about those losses. “We can’t have back exactly what we lost. What got taken from us. But we do this and we win, gonna feel good to face all that and end up driving the wagon rather than run over by it.”

“Just about. There’s something about it feels like it’s meant to be, I suppose.” He nudged her. “Sorry. Gotta go get something.” She climbed off his lap, waiting, as he went over to their things, digging in the trunk. Came up with the picture of his mother. They’d gotten new prints of her parents from the photographer, stubbornly clinging to Tumbleweed, and that felt good. But they couldn’t put them up on the table or the like given Bea’s rambunctiousness and even Dido’s prowling and Dusty’s ever-excited jumps and frisking tail, and they couldn’t hang them on the walls of Bright Waters’ home that wasn’t their own. So they’d stayed packed, taken out occasionally and handled and looked at with loving remembrance.

He came back over to the table and sat down again, turning the picture over and undoing the brass fasteners that kept the back on. When he pulled it off, her breath caught, seeing a few sheets of paper folded there. “What the--”

“She knew she was dying. But she told me,” he said, not looking at her, carefully plucking the papers out and unfolding them on the table, neatly smoothing them down with the edge of his hand, “that I should keep her picture with me. Showed me she’d put some things in the back. Said to not show my daddy, but that these were important things that I’d need someday.”

She reached for them, scanning the yellowed sheets of paper quickly. A baptismal record from St. John’s Church in Aberdare, Wales. A certificate of naturalization from the US government, signed in Salem, Oregon. Both of them listing one Arthur Hugh Morgan. 

“I didn’t know what they was. Couldn’t even read them until years later, after Hosea taught me. Those papers? Before that, I didn’t know my middle name. Didn’t know I even had one. Didn’t know my birthday or exactly how old I was.”

She couldn’t even imagine it. She’d never had to face anything like that. She’d always known her name, always known where and when she’d been born. Being so torn up and rootless to not even know such simple things seemed unthinkable, but that was the painful reality he’d lived. “Arthur…”

“My father couldn’t get American citizenship, of course. You have to be of _good moral character_. But my mother, she did. Mostly I think she done it for me, cause I was young enough that her getting it automatically transferred to me. She wanted me to have chances. I finally read them when I was fifteen. Told myself they was of no use. Not the life I was living. Seemed stupid anyway, given I was getting disillusioned with America anyway with Dutch’s philosophy, that she’d dreamed that these,” he tapped the papers with a finger, “would be some magic talisman, open the door to some wonderful life. But I never did get rid of them. She couldn’t even read that parish record, but she made sure she got it before they left Wales so that I could get my citizenship. Got whatever other papers she needed along the way. It….it mattered to her, and she fought hard for me to have a chance.” The same as he hadn’t been able to get rid of his father’s hat, she imagined. It took on its own sentimental value and meaning.

She picked up the parish record. “We can use this,” she said, keeping her voice quiet only with effort, excitement filling her. “Avoid some scrutiny. Though you’re gonna have to explain why you’re ‘Griffith’ and not ‘Morgan’.”

“My daddy died when I was real young, she remarried a man named Griffith, and since he raised me, I go by his name.” He cracked a bit of a smirk. “I spent years with a conman, sweetheart. Explaining a little thing like that? Child’s play.”

“So we’re gonna be simultaneously British and American, are you?” He shrugged, still obviously amused. “Well, I suppose it’s like us becoming the Griffiths. A little lie here and there that don’t hurt nobody and keeps the peace. It gonna be a problem, you showing that piece of paper with ‘Morgan’ on it?”

“Can’t be the only “Arthur Morgan’ out there. They all think I’m dead. Besides, nobody ever knew I wasn’t born in America. Not even Hosea or Dutch. They sure ain’t looking for me here.” He looked over at Sadie. “My momma, she wanted me to have a good life. I remember that. Maybe I can give her that, finally. And do it with what she gave me to do it. That seems fitting.” He carefully folded up his citizenship papers and put them back behind the picture, but left the parish record on the table. 

As he went and put the photograph back in the trunk, she thought she heard him say in barely more than a whisper, “ _Diolch yn fawr, Mam_.” She felt a lump in her throat at that, hearing his gratitude, then she crossed the room herself, reaching into her satchel for her own piece of paper that she’d thought could change things. He came over to her, footsteps quiet as ever. “What you got there?”

“I agree, OK? I don’t want to go full time bounty catching unless it’s our last resort. But we need something steady, especially for the next few years. We gotta have capital to work the land, or we’re right back where Jake and I was. We both know it. Then I saw this posted in Queensbury at the train station and it felt like it might be the answer.” She held the folded paper out to him. “Don’t laugh,” she warned him.

He unfolded the poster, and his eyebrows shot up, but he didn’t laugh. “Stellar and Spangler’s Spectacular Symposium--the circus?”

“They’ll be here in Banner in a couple days, by the dates on that poster.”

“Your suggestion is that we run away to join the circus, Daisy?” He sounded amused, but not derisively so. “Coming real far from a Tumbleweed sodbuster, no doubt.”

She looked at him, shrugging. “So maybe I make Caroline more jealous of us having all the adventures. That fella asked us to join his circus, back when we caught that jaguar. It’s honest money doing things we’ve got some talent for already. Riding, shooting, handling horses.” She gave him a sly grin. “Maybe a little conning and showmanship.”

“Put it that way, it seems only half-crazy.” She playfully pushed his shoulder, shooting him a look. “Quarter-crazy?” He held up his hands in mock surrender. “All right, all right, it’s a smart answer. I don’t know that it pays well, though.”

“Maybe not, but neither did ranch work or odd jobs, to be fair, and this is at least steady. If they pay our way and feed us, we can get our heads back above water, start saving something again. Plus we wouldn’t have to leave the kids. Circus folk travel as a family. I know that. Be kind of like being back with the gang, I imagine.” Seeing that poster on the wall felt like serendipity--an unconventional answer, to be sure, but strangely right all the same.

He looked at the brightly colored poster again, with its picture of a satin-clad woman balanced on the back of a horse, and handed it back to her. “All right. They’re putting up canvas near Banner, we go see what they think.” He shook his head, and she could see his shoulders shaking with the suppressed amusement, but she thought it was mostly a laugh of relief at everything possibly falling into place after so much worry, rather than mockery. “Shit, why not? Let’s have us an adventure. You’re right. Might as well stick to what we do well, and do something honest by it.”

“So we go back to Banner in a couple days, see whoever runs the show, and if it works out, go sign them papers?”

He gathered her into his arms in the shadows of that small cabin, and she held him close too. The sense of a weight lifted, the sudden lightness of hope, felt almost unbearable, her heart racing at it. Almost like being a green girl again, the wide world open with all its possibility, before all the hardship and heartache took its toll. Dreaming wildly, almost recklessly, but maybe, just maybe, this time it would pay off. “Yeah. That’s exactly what we do.”

~~~~~~~~~~

The circus set up just to the southwest of Banner, As they approached, they watched the workers hauling on the lines, the canvas billowing up and up like some fantastic castle rising above the formerly quiet prairie, a gargantuan riot of bold blue and yellow stripes that would be visible for miles around.

The rest of it suited too, reminding him of that circus down in Mexico--he hoped Sally Nash was well. Moving among the crowd of materials, animals in their cages, people rushing back and forth yelling orders in a slang he didn’t even know, he stood there for a moment, taking it all in. The wave of nostalgia hit him unexpectedly. Even the cursing seemed comfortably familiar.

Sadie’s touch on his shoulder brought him back, and as he looked at her, she gave him a slight smile. “Like setting up camp back in the day, huh?”

“Yeah.” 

Asking a fantastically tattooed and muscular man lugging a crate of supplies as if it were no more than a pillow, he looked them up and down. “You two artists?”

“I draw,” he said, confused. “She sings. That’s probably of more use.”

He smirked, casually holding the crate still. “I mean performers, rube. Boss man’s in the red wagon.” He nodded towards an obviously blue painted wagon. “Good luck,” he called jovially, giving a wave. “Tom’s hiring, if you got the stuff. Else we need laborers. Might be more suited to that.”

“Guess he’s just messing with us,” Sadie said Spanish, half under her breath.

Knocking on the door of the not-red “red wagon”, a man’s voice yelled irritably, “I told all of you I needed a few minutes!”

“Hope we’re not interrupting anything,” he called, unable to help a dry edge to his tone, hoping the boss didn’t have a woman in there or something. “Tattooed fella told us to come see you.”

The door swung open, and a man popped down the few steps built in below it, dropping to the ground. Fifty or so, greying, bristling like an angry badger, looking at the two of them with steel-grey eyes. “What’s Fred sending me a couple of hayseeds for?” He sighed. “Pardon. You’re finding me...out of sorts. My partner and my, ah, inamorata seem to have absconded on the way from Queensbury. Which leaves me, to put it politely, _rather fucked_ as they were essential talent. One can’t run a circus without a solid equestrian director, for one.”

“No, one cannot,” he agreed, trying to keep a straight face. 

“I have sixteen horses without a master, and Sarah was our star rider as well. And I’ll be Goddamned if I can find a horse trainer worth their salt in this Godforsaken stretch of prairie.” He found himself trying not to smile, not because the man’s plight amused him, but the cursing and outsized, dramatic persona seemed to fit perfectly. It put him in mind of some of Hosea’s acts.

“Funny you should mention,” Sadie said brightly. “My husband and me seem to be looking for work, you seem to be looking for folks that can ride and train horses. We almost joined up with another circus a few years ago when they asked, after we sold them a black jaguar, but we had some health issues in the family so we couldn’t leave.”

“We can do fine shooting besides,” he said. “Uh--knife throwing. Sadie here’s a particular talent at it.” He thought about it more, and spied the billowing canvas. “Even handled a hot air balloon once, if you got use for that.”

The man stared at them like they’d started speaking Japanese or Swiss. “You can’t train a jaguar. Every cat man with his salt knows that.”

“Sure, we know that,” he replied coolly. “But the boss man there said she made a nice display for folk.”

He looked them up and down again. “Show me a bit of what you’ve got on riding, then.” It was a command, not an invitation. 

He looked over at Sadie. She gave a half shrug, and a nod. He whistled for Buell, and as he heard the big horse’s approach, he took a long, steadying breath. Like shooting--go on empty lungs. He caught Buell’s bridle and kicked up, one foot in the stirrup, jumping to settle in the saddle. Weaving among the wagons was a challenge, but he’d run Buell in tight quarters before, so he managed to circle back around, and he saw Sadie waiting, her arm held up, intent obvious. “I got you,” he yelled in Welsh, and as they passed, he grabbed her forearm, and she jumped up. He used the momentum of that leap to help swing her up behind him.

“Go for the flat topped green wagon,” she said in his ear, fingers gripping his shirt over his ribs. “We’ll jump. Just like a train robbery, huh?”

He couldn’t help but let out a laugh at that, urging Buell on. Compared to a racing train or stagecoach, a stationary circus wagon was easy, even if he wasn’t twenty-five anymore. Drawing close alongside, he felt the shift behind him of Sadie standing, and then heard her grunt of effort as she leaped. Raking Buell back sharply at the end of the lot, he headed for the wagon again, seeing Sadie standing there, and a ways before he pulled up alongside, he got to his feet, balanced carefully as Buell charged ahead as expected. After he jumped onto the wagon, Sadie whistled for Bob, and they both hopped back down.

Reining in, dismounting, he looked at the circus boss, seeing his poker face split into a bit of a smile. “You ever worked a circus?”

“No.”

“It shows. If you worked one, I would have figured it for a miserable mud show. You’ve got some solid skills, but no polish or flair on then. Trick riding for fun, was it?”

“Just about,” he answered. As good an answer as any, he supposed.

“You’re married, you say?”

“Yeah. We got two kids also,” Sadie replied. 

“Family types. So you won’t be causing romantic melodramatics also. Wonderful.”

“Arthur’s also good at helping manage big concerns on the move like this,” Sadie mentioned. “He was working in...logging camps.”

“You need someone hollered at, I can get them in line. Sadie and me, we can scout sites, find out who needs their palm greased in a city, find out what your competition’s maybe doing. All of that.”

“From working logging camps,” the boss repeated dryly.

“From working logging camps.” He looked the man in the eye, daring him to call it out as utter crap.

He grinned instead. “Well, hallelujah. I seem to have produced a much-needed miracle from amidst the cattle shit of New Caledonia.” He held out his hand. “Thomas Stellar. And you are…?”

“Arthur and Sadie Griffith.”

Stellar gestured them to the wagon. “Then why don’t you come in and we’ll discuss terms.” He held the door politely for Sadie.

From there, it was to Landry’s office, showing the parish record, handing over the ten dollars, and signing the contract. He didn’t feel particularly British, given he’d been an American damn near all his life, but it didn’t matter. His mother’s foresight, gone slightly at a different angle than expected, had handed him the keys he needed. He couldn’t help but feel even more dejected that he recalled so little of her, and it felt strange to so sharply miss someone he’d barely known, but he did all the same. Hoping that finally, he’d made her proud by seizing the life and the dreams she’d had for him, and fought so hard to give him. Making his life his own at last. It seemed that little pink succulent, still happily surviving in its jar, had been a good luck charm indeed.

Riding back to Minnewakan, it still hardly felt real. “Things seem to be turning, ain’t they?” he asked Sadie as they headed for the cabin, having collected Bea and Mattie. “We’re finally starting to swim, not getting dragged around by the current.” They’d been at the mercy of circumstances for so long it seemed terrifying and wonderful all at once to feel the strange freedom of charting their own destiny.

“Yeah,” she said, and he could hear the note of excited wonder in her voice at it. “We ain’t the only ones, though.” She nodded over to Charles’ cabin, the light glowing through the window. “Are you gonna be OK to say goodbye to Danny?”

“They’re sticking together. Promised each other that.” The diphtheria apparently had its effect there. “They’re married, by Hehakaton standards. By the old gang’s too, at that. Probably get a letter saying they’re marrying, whenever a preacher comes around. I was always his uncle. But Danny’s got himself a father now. Charles loves that boy. I see it.” He managed a smile. “Seems they both got what they needed from it. Karen too. She’s got more than being a spinster sister.” Charles had needed that family tie every bit as much, given how alone he said he’d always felt, and seeing the happiness in him these last few weeks, Arthur couldn’t help but be pleased for him, for Karen, and for Danny. They’d built something strong and true out of what seemed like mere broken bits, as he and Sadie had.

Something in him grieved quietly still to say goodbye to the boy he’d loved so much, clever and lively in a way that reminded him so much of Isaac. Perhaps this was what would have come of him and Eliza in the end, had he stayed too scared to admit he wanted that place as a husband and father in that cabin. “We always gotta say goodbye in the end. But saying it cause our paths are diverging to better lives? I can’t regret that. Just the same as I couldn’t regret seeing folk leave the gang in the end.”

“Ain’t nothing wrong in wanting a better life.” She smiled at that. “Especially for them as you love.” 

Lying there in bed, feeling Sadie dozing beside him, curling closer to him and her hair tickling against his nose from it, he brushed it aside enough to breathe. Started thinking of that land, trying to fix it in his mind’s eye. He ended up slipping quietly from bed, and sketching that remembered view of the lake and the prairie from the woods, needing to capture that image on paper in the same way they’d captured it in law with that contract. It made it more real. Closing the journal, tucking it away again, he went back to bed.

Then he was in another cabin, one familiar to him too. There was that door that always stuck and never closed quite right because the whole cabin had been built in such a hurry. So-called Arthur McCready had paid about everything he’d had to make sure his lovely, hugely pregnant wife Eliza quickly had another home after their supposed cabin in Colorado burned in a fire. He’d been gone a week from the gang making frantic arrangements, then hurried back to Dutch’s angry questions, sick from the need to get back to his family at war with the knowledge that the woman he’d left carrying his child was living in a hotel racking up a bill while she waited for a safe home to live and give birth, and he couldn’t stick around long enough to see that done. Torn in two already, and it’d be that way until the day Eliza and Isaac died, and far beyond. Perhaps it was true even now in some ways.

“It’s good to see you, Arthur.” He hadn’t heard that voice in years either. Low, husky, but gentle. He turned to see Eliza, but not the woman of twenty-three who’d last waved goodbye from that obviously crooked cabin porch. She looked older, thirty or more, fully grown and the last of the girlishness gone from her, even a few threads of grey in that wavy, wild dark hair of hairs. Much like he’d seen a younger Hosea in that dream of Montana--seemed this place beyond the veil of the living and tangible world had its own rules.

“Eliza.” That feeling of being forever an interloper in this cabin welled up inside of him again, and it felt all the more painfully acute now for having known what it was like to truly belong, to feel safe and loved and wanted. “Seems we ended up here with things to say.”

“Mmhmm.” She sat down at the table, looking up at him. “I wondered when you’d show up.”

“Well, you never did quite know when I’d come to call, did you?” He tried for a feeble joke, but it really felt more of a painful admission of another facet of his failure. “No wonder you was annoyed sometimes. I’d drop in without notice, upend your life for a few days, then upset the boy by vanishing again--”

“Arthur,” she said with a sigh, covering her eyes with a hand for a moment, then meeting his gaze, those big grey eyes soft with understanding. “Sure. I got upset some. I was a woman, not a saint, and raising a little boy, and it was hard. But I never hated you. Does it gotta go like this? We hurt each other plenty back then.”

“We did. I’m sorry. I didn’t know what I had. That I wanted it more than anything. Too afraid, I guess. To leave Dutch, and to ask if you’d let me stay.”

“I almost asked,” she said, her voice hushed. “That last time I thought to myself, ‘If I take a chance, would it happen?’. If maybe...” 

“I did too.” 

“Or sometimes I’d think perhaps I just should take Isaac and go live with your people. But I figured...that door was shut. You done your duty by Isaac as best you could, but you and me? I’d told you when you asked that I couldn’t be your wife. And besides, you didn’t want me for your woman. You made that clear.”

“It wasn’t that. I figured that one night was more than enough trouble for you to not ever want to repeat it. Not with the likes of me.”

“I know that. Now. I didn’t then.” She looked aside, towards the window. “I figured you’d saw who you woke up with. A disappointment.” Her voice wavered a bit. “I lied to you. Said I didn’t remember a thing, like you. I remembered just a little, a few moments here and there. You was sweeter than Richie ever was. Like you loved me.” She looked at him directly now, something gentle and almost sad in her eyes now. “You called me ‘Mary’. I didn’t miss Richie after a little while, but I knew I was never gonna take the place of your Mary. I wasn’t no fine lady. Richie left after he got what he wanted from me. And I was always gonna be just some mongrel waitress girl you got pregnant who took your money cause I was desperate and you was obligated.”

He couldn’t help but wince that she’d seen it like he had, and also not surprised he’d drunkenly mumbled Mary’s name at a dark-haired girl, alcohol and longing painting reality with the colors of fantasy. He’d always known deep down that he’d gone with Eliza that night, either convinced or wishing she was Mary, or more likely, some of both. The shame of it still cut deeply, nearly twenty years later, and the ache for Eliza that one night drunk off her ass with a stranger was the only time she’d been touched with love, not lust, and it hadn’t even been hers to claim. Knowing what he did now from Sadie, he hurt for how much she’d deserved more. “You could have. Mary was--that wasn’t real, in the end. I was starting to see that. And you was such a pretty gal. I never looked down on you for your blood.” He kept his voice steady only with effort. His heart ached, wondering if she’d been trying to tell him about that in her sidelong way, talking about her black and Indian blood and how she felt she didn’t belong. “I didn’t know it was like that for you too. If we’d ever thought we was...good enough for someone to keep, that would have helped.”

“We was a pair of scared and ashamed kids in over our heads. I panicked when you told me you was an outlaw. Said I was better off being gossipped about than married to you. Gave you the notion that all you was good for was the money, and that stuck. It wasn’t that I didn’t like you. Love you, even. You was kind, and how much you loved our boy--there was a good man you wanted to be, I thought.” She kept holding his gaze with hers. “I was always glad to see you.”

“I was always glad to come back.” She probably knew it, in that knowing way those who’d gone before seemed to have, but she ought to hear it. “It got harder and harder to leave.”

“But I figured it was me not being enough to make you stay. Not knowing how to fix what we broke. So we kept telling ourselves whatever we had was only for Isaac’s sake. I wish...I wish so damn much we’d gotten the chance to figure it out.”

“Me too,” he said, throat suddenly tight. “We could have been something good together, I think.” So many years he could have had happiness, a good and peaceful life, getting out before he threw himself fully into the shit of an increasing darkness. He’d taken a few lives before he found those crosses in the yard outside this cabin, but always out of necessity, in the furious heat of a job. Impartial killings of pure survival, that was all. Those four men had been the first ones he’d killed for no reasons except personal ones. They were the ones that made him finally feel like a bloodstained killer, who needed to stop lying to himself.

She gave him a smile, one of those sweet, slow smiles she’d had that lit up that high-cheekboned face. “You thought I was pretty, huh? Even this old beak?” She pinched her aquiline nose.

“I always thought it was distinguished,” he assured her, feeling on the edge of either laughing or crying, maybe at the same time. “The Romans would have worshipped that nose, you know.”

He swore she blushed, smoothing a hand over that hair she’d always tried so hard to keep tamed into a braid. “Well. Isaac, he got your nose, and I’m thankful for that.”

Now he looked around, not seeing Isaac anywhere. “The boy. Is he--”

“He’s outside. Went fishing. Go talk to him a bit. I’ll be here.”

Fishing? Alone? He got up from the table, heading for the door. It didn’t stick like the real one had, opening easily, and he headed for the creek, following it down towards the small pool that had been the best fishing spot. 

Though the boy there wasn’t a four year old. He looked about what he should have been in 1904--eighteen, tall but lanky in that way Arthur remembered being at that age, where nothing fit quite right, either too loose or too short in the sleeves or legs, because it would be years yet until he grew into his height and filled out. Would have grown into it, anyway.

He wondered for a moment if children kept growing in this place, but then he knew, in some deep unspoken way, that this was probably what Isaac had become immediately when he got here, and it was as old as he would ever get. He’d grown enough for the wisdom and knowledge of this place to make sense and sit more easily beyond his shoulders, because an eternity living surrounded by a world far beyond a tiny child’s comprehension sounded honestly like hell, but he’d died as a little boy. He’d never become a man, not even here. That potential of him would never fully be realized--there would always be something left unfinished.

Eliza’s dark, messy hair and olive skin and her fine grey eyes, but now that Isaac was mostly grown, and he let himself look with something besides a mind to self-punishment and wanting to deny his son any inheritance since it felt like a damn curse, he could see the echoes of himself. The nose, yes. His brows. The shape of his jaw. The height, the build he likely would have had. _My son._ Bittersweet, then, to look at him, and see the boy who should have been making stupid mistakes out in the world even now, and see something of who he would have become. Much as it hurt, he was grateful for this chance nonetheless. “Isaac.”

Isaac smiled, guileless and sweet. “Hey, Pa.” Then Isaac glanced at him, brows furrowing in concern. “You here visiting Ma and me?”

“Yeah. I can’t stay.” He managed a self-conscious, cracked laugh. “Like old times, that.” God, that hurt suddenly, realizing he’d once again have to leave them behind. “It ain’t that I don’t want to stay…I never wanted to leave, not for real. I only left cause I had two obligations pulling me back and forth and I couldn’t make sense of them. That don’t change the pain I caused, but I hope you can believe it.”

Isaac held up a hand. “I do. But you got kids now you gotta worry about.”

“They ain’t...Mattie in particular…” He took a deep breath., trying to focus the rambling riot in his head into something coherent before he spoke “He’s my son. But you are too. It ain’t that he’s...” He’d looked at Mattie last year when he was born, worrying for a moment that would be the case, but holding that tiny newborn in his hands, looking into his eyes, he’d known. The pain was there, echoes of the past, but Mattie was his own self, and always would be. “There’s no replacing you, Isaac. I never forgot you. And I never will.”

Isaac shot him a look that made him smile in spite of himself, pure boyish annoyance. “I know that, Pa. I see things just fine. You don’t gotta explain to me like you did then.”

“OK. But maybe I needed to say it.” 

“Got worried you’d died that you showed up. But you’re visiting, so it ain’t your time yet. And they need you.” He ducked his head shyly. “But it’s sure good to see you again.”

“Yeah,” he said, throat tight as he looked at Isaac, pride and love and sorrow mingling within him all at once. “It sure is.” He sat down on the rock next to the pool, watching a leaping trout. “I’m here only a short time, so I might as well say what needs saying. I ain’t ever gonna be able to give you advice on living, so guess this is me being your father as much as I can. You’re old enough to understand it now.”

Isaac sat down beside him, nodding. “Go on.”

“Your momma and me made a mistake. That didn’t ever make you one. And I was too young and foolish and too messed up from the upbringing I had to know how to be with you. Sometimes when I left, I was scared that the longer I was around, the more I’d probably...ruin you somehow. Just by who I was. What I was.” He closed his eyes, admitting to Isaac what he’d admitted only in part to Sadie during their fight. “I’m still feeling that notion with Bea and Mattie now. That I got damaged too much. That I ain’t fit to be anyone’s father. That I’m crazy for even trying and whatever happens to them is on me.” 

“Don’t you run,” Isaac said, determination suddenly in his voice. “I cried when you left cause you was good to me. I wanted you there, Daddy. I needed you. They need you. You love them enough to fight to be better for them. You would have for me.”

“Would I?”

“Yeah.” Isaac looked at him with those same grey eyes as Eliza’s. “You would have stayed, someday.”

He couldn’t deny it to himself anymore. “I wish to hell I had.”

“Me too. Wouldn’t have changed what happened to Ma and me, though, I think. Some things just is meant to be.” Isaac looked out into the distance. “You can’t change all that. But I ain’t angry with you.” 

“Me neither.” He heard Eliza’s voice behind them, and looked over his shoulder to see her there. That same pride in Isaac he remembered glowed in her eyes, but he saw it now--the affection for him she’d hidden too out of her own fear. “You said goodbye, or thought you did. But you gotta dig the guilt out, Arthur. Isaac and me don’t want it.”

He shook his head, unable to accept that. “You both deserved a lot more than a cabin with a shitty door that didn’t ever work right, and me there like you was both an afterthought.”

“We wasn’t, though.” Eliza sat down beside him, on the other side from Isaac. “I know it. You wouldn’t have carried it this long, and so heavy, if that was true.”

“I’m here tonight cause I’m on the edge of having a good life.” Thinking about that damn ten dollars and how fate and lives turned upon it, and the sheer wonderful awful symmetry of it. “God knows Sadie and the kids deserve it. But I guess I’m still struggling to find a way to feel like I do. When you didn’t get that. When so many folk I hurt didn’t. I suppose I needed to know if you...resent me for that.”

“Life ain’t always fair. You made mistakes, but you done your best to claim them. You can’t do right by your kids and your wife if there’s a part of you that still feels guilty that they exist,” Eliza told him bluntly. “That you’ll be the ruin of them. If you loved us for real, then don’t be so hellbound to make us into the knife that cuts it all to pieces for you. You already tried to make Karen’s boy into some atonement you don’t need, and Sadie called you out on that, didn’t she?” 

He felt himself blushing, awkward at the knowledge she’d seen that fight, and who knew what else, but trying to not let it get to him and get in the way of important things right here and now. Isaac chimed in, “We’ll never be gone, not truly. Gonna see you again someday. But you gotta let go and forgive yourself. It ain’t Ma and me resenting your happiness. It’s you blaming yourself for having it.”

“I know when I’m defeated. You and your ma and Sadie all telling me that, how can I argue?”

Eliza smiled. “I like her, truth be told. Like to meet her, but not too soon. And I like the folk in your family too, outlaw or no. Hosea and Bessie especially. I saw I was wrong to judge you so quick, even if I got too scared to say so. I should have figured I’d be wrong about them.”

“I don’t know how to just go off and forgive myself, all right, but I’ll try.” He turned to them, gave Eliza a kiss on the cheek, allowing himself and her that kindness after all these years. “You always was a fine woman. The best.” Then he felt helpless to do anything but put his arms around them, holding them tightly for a moment in a way he hadn’t really allowed himself with Isaac, so conscious of what he’d assumed was Eliza’s careful scrutiny and judgment of how much she’d let a filthy outlaw taint her boy, and certainly never allowed himself with Eliza. “I’m sorry for the ways I let you down. But I loved you both. Always will, too.” He closed his eyes, and let them go, not wanting to be the one who walked away this time, but not wanting to watch them leave either. They must have understood, because he heard the quiet footsteps heading back towards the cabin. When he woke he found the dampness on his pillow where he’d cried a little in his sleep, and that somehow didn’t surprise him.

By the time they’d eaten breakfast, and gotten the kids to go see Rains Fall and Stands Fast, he felt a greater sense of calm within him. It wouldn’t be immediate, it was going to take a fair bit of work and pain to truly make his way towards that insistence on cutting loose the guilt. Letting go of the grief of unrealized hopes, all the potential of who Isaac could have become, all the potential of what he and Eliza could have been together. Now he knew some of what Sadie struggled with, given she had to let go of all those lost dreams of a future with Jake, withered on the vine. But believing that they hadn’t died blaming him, being able to say some things, did help. Now all he had to do was tell the man who’d claimed him as a son, who adored his children, that they were leaving for a few years, when he’d lost two sons already.

Stands Fast scooped Mattie up with a smile, bouncing him in her arms, and Mattie squealed with joy at it, playing with her braids. He felt that pressure on him again. Stands Fast probably had written off the notion of grandchildren when Bright Waters threw Coyote Runs out, and clearly, Rains Fall had lost those hopes with Thunder In His Heart and Eagle Flies. Now they had this, and Danny besides, and how could he take this from them, when they’d so recently found it?

Rains Fall looked at him, brows furrowing. “You seem troubled.”

“It’s good news and bad,” he confessed. “Maybe we should all sit.”

Rains Fall gestured him to the table, and Stands Fast put Mattie down, the kids busy playing soon enough. He caught Rains Fall’s fond glance towards them, the sound of children in this cabin.

“We’ve contracted some land nearby. I know it got taken from your people, or at least other Indians, so it ain’t right. And I know it ain’t your way, owning land. But it’s the way things is in the world and it’s the world we gotta live in, for good or bad, ain’t it? And I know you offered to let us stay here, but we shouldn’t have to live off your generosity. Not when we can maybe be in a position to help your people if we do this right.”

Stands Fast raised an eyebrow at that, but her smile was kind enough. “You don’t need to apologize. You didn’t write the laws or the treaties. But it’s good to hear you’ll be staying.”

Sadie saved him having to plunge in the dagger, and the gratitude he felt at that almost overwhelmed him. “We can’t stay. Not just yet. We need money to work the land, so we can keep it. We got work that’ll pay, but it’s not here in New Caledonia. So we gotta leave for a time. We have to be back within three years, though, so we will be.” 

Rains Fall looked temporarily gutted, but then sat back in his chair and finally nodded. “You have to do what’s right for your family. For your children,” he amended. Maybe he should have figured they might understand. The Hehakaton loved their kids so much that they would understand wanting to do things for their sake. He glanced over at Sadie and Stands Fast. “May we leave you for a little while?”

“Sure,” Sadie replied.

“Daughters and mothers need time away from the men sometimes,” Stands Fast said teasingly, giving Rains Fall a fond smile. “You’ve seen that with Bright Waters.”

He returned the gesture to his wife, dark eyes crinkling at his smile, and Arthur could see the affection shining there between then, clear and true, despite all the losses. “Very true. I’m lucky I have two sons to speak to, huh?”

“You’ll have three soon enough if Bright Waters has her way,” Stands Fast said with a chuckle. He couldn’t quite make sense of that, but never mind. It wasn’t his business.

Looking at the two of them, if he and Sadie should be so lucky as to have that in another thirty years, he’d count himself truly fortunate. 

He headed out onto the porch, and Rains Falls followed him a minute later, holding something in his hands. He held it out to Arthur, and he took it in his hands, looking at the black-tipped eagle feather with bright quillwork bands around the shaft, then looking up at the old man. “Even we can’t wear these as we once did. And it’s not your way. But it’s mine. And in the end, people matter more, yet some things do matter, because they give our honor, or love, to people when given. If the thing is lost, it doesn’t take away the meaning.” Arthur couldn’t help but look at the wedding ring on that same hand holding the feather, knowing Rains Fall was right. If he lost it or had it taken somehow, the love Sadie had for him wasn’t lost with it, because the giving of it was what mattered. Rains Fall gestured to the feather. “I gave one to Charles years ago after our first winter here. I have another for Sadie. These particular type were meant as a warrior’s honors, but we gave feathers for many things. Besides, you and I know both that there’s more glory to be had than in war itself. So I give this for what you’ve done in helping my people, and the honor and wisdom you’ve found within yourself.”

“ _Até_ ,” he said, shaking his head, feeling the weight of Rains Fall’s pride in him settling awkwardly. “I don’t…” There he went again, questioning the man’s judgment by saying he didn’t know enough, and somewhat rejecting the kindness and love that had been offered. He made himself shut up, stop protesting. “Thank you.”

“Eagles are sacred messengers to the spirits. That’s why their feathers carry that kind of honor. Eagle Flies--maybe his name was too much of a burden to bear. Too many hopes and dreams that Shooting Star and I had for him, saying he would be someone who would soar as high as eagles. And I held on to him too tightly after I lost one son. But sons need to leave their fathers eventually, live their own lives. Charles is starting that now. You couldn’t come with us five years ago because of your sickness, and you have to go again now and tend to things to provide for your family. I understand.” He gave a wistful little smile. “You seem certain of things now, in a way you weren’t before. Certain of yourself.”

“I’m trying. But I know my path now. What matters. We’ll write you and Stands Fast, until we return. Sadie and me both agreed this is where we want to be.” He caught Rains Fall’s gaze. “And I want my children to know you. So we’ll come back. I swear it.” A vow made, and he knew how that would hold and bind him, and he was fine with that. This was a man worth making promises, and he knew the difference full well now. Believed that his own word had some worth now. The past was still there, and the scars and the doubt, but it held a little less ability to chain him down now. 

The goodbyes would hurt, but they were temporary this time. They’d be back, and he’d see Charles, Danny, Karen, Felipe, Rains Fall, and other new friends and family again. “We’ll be back,” he repeated, as much to himself as to Rains Fall.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Arthur’s Journal**  
We have a claim on some good land here in New Caledonia, but we’re running away with the circus in about a week. If that don’t sound damn crazy, and yet it’s the answer to things. Better than bounty hunting anyway, and ain’t like I can go become some stockbroker. We need the money to develop and therefore keep the land, and so it goes.

I have my mother’s foresight to thank for that working out so neatly as it did, even if it’s directed a bit different than she imagined. Hope I done her proud in the end. Thinking of what I want for Bea and Mattie I end up thinking about her a great deal too. Eliza and Isaac too, but I am making my peace with that as best I can. 

Seems 1907 will see us back here one way or another, either with our own place or making something else work. The people here are family now and that’s what matters most in the end. It’s nice to have somewhere to belong.

Sadie is as formidable as ever once she’s got a singular goal in her head. Glad we’re pulling together in harness on this. I may be a Godawful fool still on too many things but I make a hell of a fighter, and this life we hope to have for us and for the kids is well worth the battle.

( **Sketch of the view of Deer Lake** , captioned “Deer Lake. HOME, soon enough”.)

( **Sketch of Charles, Karen, and Danny** , captioned “Seems New Caledonia worked its charms on Karen too. Or maybe it was mostly Charles.”)

( **Sketch of the circus big top being raised** , captioned “The next adventure. My life never ceases to be interesting.”)

(Tucked into the journal: **Photograph of Rains Fall, Stands Fast, Bright Waters, Charles, Karen, Danny, Sadie, Arthur, Bea, and Mattie in front of a cabin** , with the note “Family at Minnewakan, August 1904”)

 **Sadie’s Journal**  
I lost so much in my younger years. Then I got a second chance at love and at children. So it seems strangely kind that I get a second chance at a farm and home. The land here is good, and the people even finer. We have family here, and a promising future. It’s like everything is coming together finally. It scares me a bit. Everything was in ASHES for me, and I expected so little for so long that I find myself eyeing what seems like a dream come true with some suspicion. 

But that don’t change the fact that I want it so. And so does Arthur. He’s realizing that for perhaps the first time. Does he know how excited he gets talking about all of it, when he felt afraid to hope for much of anything before? I ain’t quite sure. But it’s a fine look on him, and it feels fine to get excited myself at the notion of a better future.

It’s been hard years for us both. The next few years will be no picnic for sure but all our efforts now are in a clear direction towards something, rather than reacting to being steered around by forces beyond us. Bandits. TB. Government. The burdens put on us by our parents, or a rotten mentor.

Both fine and frightening to feel that free. I’m mindful to not put too much on the kids as they get older. Momma and Daddy loved me, but the way they raised me, I loved and feared them both in some ways, and Bea and Mattie need better than that. I want them to have a good life and choices to make. This land, this ranch we want to make, is the start of that. It’s worth the risk. 

So here’s hoping that 1908 finds us happy and settled back here in New Caledonia.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> That's the end of Chapter XI, folks. Chapter XII will pick up hopefully next week!


	41. Bonne Chasse: The Show Must Go On

**Several years later…**  
He looked in through the tied-back canvas, and saw a packed house sitting on the wooden stringers. Figured it would be a good take given the stream of people he’d seen flooding in--Saturday afternoon shows were always a good take. 

Packed big top--that was a good sign. Though when they’d offloaded the wagons and everything from the train station and made parade through the streets of St. Denis, the attention that zebras and lions and performers got made it clear Tom’s decision to offload there, rather than closer in Rhodes, was a good one. More people in St. Denis, with more money, and even though they had to head out a ways to the west into Scarlett Meadows due to there being no good spot to pitch the big top anywhere in the bayou, it obviously hadn’t deterred the interest. The fact it was a brisk February day didn’t hurt business, given it was warm inside the crowded circus tent with all those bodies. People were looking for something to do, and being inside with the flair and excitement of the circus certainly brought color to a grey and overcast day.

Though even as he’d been riding on Buell through those streets he hadn’t seen in seven and a half years now, waving to kids and the like, he couldn’t help but search the crowd with sharp eyes here and there, looking for recognition. He’d been able to pass through then because of so carefully wearing a mask during every crime the gang committed in the city, so people knew the Van Der Lindes including one vicious bastard Arthur Morgan were involved, but they didn’t know exactly what said vicious bastard Arthur Morgan looked like. They sure as shit weren’t looking for a supposed Cossack. He hadn’t been back in St. Denis since--when? The last time he’d been here had been after Colm’s hanging, when he’d been “helping” Lemieux, and instead ended up helping put Jean-Marc in as mayor. Tilly and Mary-Beth both said he’d done the place some good.

There was still that faint buzz of anxiousness all the same, but it eased as they made it through town without any issue. He was a figure of attention for being part of the Stellar and Spangler’s Spectacular Symposium, though Ed Spangler had been long gone and a star rider and a lot of money with him with him, but that was all. 

Stepping back from the open performer’s entrance, he looked over at Sadie. “We got a good crowd.”

She smiled at that. “Nice to bring something to the folk around here other than bullets,” she said to him in an undertone, straightening the collar of his shirt.

“Sure.” He couldn’t disagree with that. 

Hearing Teddy’s deep rumble as he shouted the build-up of the introduction, “...they were on horseback long before they could walk, held in the arms of their parents, forming a nearly-mystic bond with their steeds. Trained in the ways of the Tatars and Huns themselves passed down among their people, from the steppes of Siberia, I give you the incredible, the inimitable, _the Karolov Cossacks, Nikolai and Tatiana_!” The band played the sprightly Russian entrance music as he swung up into Buell’s saddle, watching Sadie go ahead of him on Bob. Coolly counting off ten seconds, he nudged Buell with his heels, sending the big gold stallion flying into the tent. Ready for Sadie to drop onto Buell behind him from where she’d caught the bandstand rigging and climbed up, standing by Charlie, the bandmaster. Felt her hands on his shoulders, braced and standing behind him, and knew by the feel she’d stuck the landing even before he heard the whistles and claps.

They ran through their paces, leaps to and from the various bits of rigging around the tent, the vaults to and from the ground, shooting tricks, Sadie standing on his shoulders while he stood in the saddle himself. Sending Buell and Bob out, and Doris sent the six black and white Appaloosas--God, they’d cost a bit in Chicago last fall, but worth it for the spectacle--in for them to do more leaps, vaults, and tricks bareback amongst what looked like an ever-flowing stream of horses whirling and turning past each other, commanded by various whistles. Bea and Mattie had excitedly named them this last winter with more than a little help from their Uncle Tom: Freckle, Speckle, Dot, Spot, Speck, and Fleck. Dot reminded him so much of Boudicca, both in her pattern and her temperament, and it didn’t surprise him the mare had become the one the other five readily looked to for cues and leads.

They’d done this however many hundred times by now, usually twice a day except once on Sundays, but in some ways, it never lost its excitement to hear the crowd’s gasps and cheers of enjoyment and wonder. Especially when it was the kids. 

They rode back out, knowing by the volume of the response that it had been a good performance. Sadie jumped down, all ready to tend to the horses, and he hurried to where he knew Teddy had left the outfit while he headed over to go prepare the cats while the clowns were on doing their pranks and pratfalls.

Undoing the sash, he hurriedly pulled off the loose Cossack shirt. He and Teddy had this down to an art now--both of them wore plain dark pants and riding boots that could just stay put as they swapped between performing and running the show. This had been so much easier until this past winter, with Tom handling all the ringmaster duties and general talk-up ballyhoo for all the acts, but they’d made do. 

He pulled on the white shirt, and by then Sadie was back, still in her own Cossack shirt, sash, pants, and boots, helping him tie the black cravat, holding the scarlet coat up for him to quickly shrug it on. Listening with a careful ear and hearing the clowns still had the crowd, he grabbed the top hat, and headed for the entrance, knowing Sadie would scurry off to go change into her costume to help Larry with his knife-throwing act. Irritated her a bit to be the one getting thrown at, but even she had to admit he was better at it than her.

Pausing under the seats, he caught his breath for a moment, then as the clowns filed out, he strode into the ring. Reminding himself even now--confidence, poise, not a care in the world. Good thing he and Teddy’s voices were close enough in pitch, and they were two similarly large men, though Teddy was a bit darker. It wouldn’t pass muster if anyone looked too closely, but at a distance it managed, given nobody paid that much attention to the ringmaster, so caught up by the acts. Besides, nobody said a circus needed a single ringmaster. But bet to not call too much attention to the swap. 

He had to take particular care to shed his New Austin accent for this, and Teddy had filed off his nasal New York accent too. Thinking of Josiah Trelawny’s posh tones helped. “A fine bit of merriment, wasn’t that?” He heard the wave of laughter behind him, turning to see Jim there in his baggy clown clothes holding a handkerchief he’d pickpocketed from Arthur--he’d taught the man that trick. Waving it at Arthur, he turned and scurried away. Arthur aimed a kick at the man’s ass as he ran, pulling the blow so it was only a slight push. Jim sold it, flailing and stumbling, tripping over his own too-long pants. He took a pratfall--cymbal crash accompanying--then lithely rolled into it, back up to his feet and kept going in a hurry out the door, victoriously waving his loot the whole while. Arthur gave an annoyed dismissive gesture, and turned back to the audience. “Suppose in the interest of decency, with all you gracious ladies and fine boys and girls here, that I’m lucky he didn’t take the shirt off my back,” he quipped, gratified to hear the laughs. “Now, where were we? Ah, yes. Ladies, gentlemen, I must ask for your cooperation in this next act. Silence, please, because you’ll witness a man’s bravery in boldly walking directly into the mouth of danger, and these beasts, if provoked, are a force beyond the control of even the most courageous and wisest of men.”

He continued the patter, introducing Teddy, also known as “Sir Phineas Tuttle-Longfellow”--God, how he hated trying to spit that name out with that Trelawny-style enunciation--explorer, adventurer, and animal tamer. Teddy strode in, giving Leona the first command, and then Leonidas, and the two lions hopped to it. The few inevitable gasps, and a few suppressed screams of surprise at the tension, broke the silence, but Teddy and the lions and tigers were old hands, used to the hushed interruptions. 

He could almost imagine Hosea’s amusement at it, seeing Arthur finally act a part and fully sink into it, given that had been hard in all the years he’d been running cons. Tough to pretend to be someone else with easy, brash confidence when the feel of being himself came with such loathing and self-consciousness. He’d had to learn, though, even then, and now he was a different man than he’d been in the gang anyway. Things sat more easily on his shoulders, given that he’d shed some of the weight of woe over hating himself to the core. Even then, he’d managed when he had to do so. He’d played Arthur Callahan, oil baron, with a certain panache, and even Josiah admitted that. True, even now, he wasn’t a posh bastard with plummy tones, and he certainly wasn’t Nikolai Karolov either. But he could play the part, and delight people by it. There was enough of a con to the circus for it to have that familiar edge, though it was an earnest, well-meaning sort. Trickery meant only to amuse and excite, not to steal. That made a difference. 

Tipping his hat and giving the crowd a bow at the end, he exited the tent last after the closing speech, the electric spotlight bright on him until he got out the performer’s door. Hearing the applause behind them, he nodded to himself. A good afternoon show for certain. They had a week here before they closed up for good.

After the crowd headed out, hearing the excitement from the kids and knowing as usual their parents would have a time of it settling them tonight, he and Sadie changed out of their costumes, got the kids, and they went for dinner at the mess wagon, eating with all the other performers and the laborers both. Tin plates of stew and beans and cornbread, simple, but hot and filling, which was necessary after a hard days’ work. 

That done, heading back to the tiny blue-and-yellow painted caravan that they called home, they got the kids settled for a bit. Bea began working her way through “Treasure Island,” slowly reading to herself and sounding out words, Dido rubbing against her leg insistently, and Bea took her finger off the page to pet the cat. Mattie sat on Arthur and Sadie’s bed at the far end, humming to himself and using wax crayons to color in sketches that Arthur had drawn for him and then redone the lines in ink to make them bolder. Right now it was a tiger, and Arthur saw he’d scrawled “Seeba” on it, after Sheba the tiger, and the “S” was backwards.

“Tigers ain’t purple, silly,” Bea said, looking over at Mattie’s coloring, giving him a raised eyebrow.

“So?” he said, coloring even harder, to the point the purple scribbles wildly crossed the sketch lines. 

“It looks dumb.”

Mattie scowled at her, brows drawing together. He pointed a finger at her, hand still clutching the well-worn purple crayon. They’d have to buy him more soon, but for a kid’s amusement that had been around only a few years, at least they were cheap. “ _You’re_ dumb!”

He sighed, looking at the two of them. “Mattie, don’t call your sister ‘dumb’. Bea, you leave his coloring alone. He wants to make purple tigers, nothing wrong with it.”

“Sheba’s _orange_ , Daddy,” she protested, expression crestfallen. “You can see it every day when we say ‘hi’ to her.”

“You’re using your imagination reading that book,” Sadie pointed out, tapping the cover of “Treasure Island” with one finger. “You like to pretend Bob and Buell are unicorns. Mattie’s just doing the same thing with his coloring, you see?”

“Fine, sorry I said you wasn’t coloring right,” Bea muttered, obviously not liking it, her mouth twisting into a pout for a moment, but accepting it. “But he gotta apologize too, don’t he?”

Sadie glanced at Mattie. “Yeah, he does.”

“Sorry I said you was dumb,” he mumbled, looking down at his coloring awkwardly, a blush spreading in his cheeks.

Sadie paused in the doorway. “All right. Daddy and me gotta go see Uncle Tom and the others for a bit. You behave, Uncle Tom or Uncle Teddy will check in on you, and we’ll be back soon to tuck you in.” No evening show tonight, given they never wanted to throw full force into a place until they saw the likely crowd, and only one Sunday show, but Arthur knew full well they’d be running two shows a day starting Monday. But that gave them the opportunity for the whole troupe to meet and figure some things out.

They met in the now-empty big top, all of them sitting on the wooden stringers, performers, musicians, roustabouts and laborers alike. Ordinary looking folks now, scrubbed clean of any grease paint, devoid of the costumes and spangles and satin. Real names now rather than stage personas, and real troubles. 

Tom sat on the bottom row, sagging in on himself with the exhausted look Arthur recognized all too well. He still managed enough to speak up once everyone was there, though the power was gone from his voice. “No point making long-winded speeches. Save that for the rubes. You all know what a Goddamn mess things are. I’m sorry.”

“TB ain’t a thing you can help, Tom,” Gladys said, shaking her head, her short blond curls so different from the beaded red wig she wore for her snake charmer act as Polly the python tamer. “Just the way it goes. And we all decided back in Lima at Christmas that it was best we fold, and coming back to a port city here was the best place to do it.”

Tom nodded, giving a bit of a wet wheeze before continuing on. “This is our run together. I telegramed some other outfits while we were in Panama. Says something that they respect us enough to be willing to hire. Not Boyle and Calloway’s, they’re cutthroat bastards who’d sell their own blessed mother to make a dime. But I heard back. Fitcher’s will be here in a few months, and Starr and Baum, after they get done with the north and people in need of a good show after being holed up for another Goddamn boring winter. Starr’s already contracted to buy the animals, so there’s that. De Palma’s, if any of you caught a real taste for South America and want to take ship and meet them in Rio. That’d mean leaving your caravan behind, though, to travel light and cheap.” A few murmurs went up at that. Far easier to get hired when an artist came with their own caravan and gear, but he was right. 

He’d started showing the TB last fall almost as soon as they landed in Buenos Aires. He’d known from Las Hermanas how awful it was to see others suffering from it, but by the time they got there, the patients had made some peace with the situation. He hadn’t had to see someone going through what he had--the anger, the fear, the struggle for accepting that a _normal life_ was now hopelessly interrupted. Arthur, of course, had urged him to try to get treatment sooner rather than later, but Thomas Stellar was a stubborn shit and insisted on trying to see his people to the best situation possible. But they’d known it was the end of this particular show. It was all they could do for the man to carry on until here, now, the end of the line. They’d gone hard since Arthur and Sadie had joined, trying to recoup what Ed Spangler had stolen. Done shows year round, even. Performed in the States when the season favored it, then taken ship and played down in South America the last two winters--though October to February were summers there, so favorable weather--while other acts hunkered down in winter quarters to make repairs, to train for new tricks and new acts, and to rest. Taken advantage of Arthur and Sadie’s Spanish to translate acts, until Tom and others learned, to varying degrees. Though when they hit Brazil, they’d found out Portuguese was an entirely different animal. 

They’d worked their way north after that Christmas meeting in Peru, and took ship in Colombia at Barranquilla a couple of weeks ago, cutting the South American summer season a bit short in order to get everyone back to North America to decide their fates from there. This was the end, and Arthur could admire something in Tom that he could admit defeat with such grace, and that he’d hung on for their sakes. He only hoped it hadn’t cost the man precious time he couldn’t get back in terms of chances for survival. But he was the last man who could criticize that. He hadn’t run either when he had the opportunity to save himself and quit because of his TB, because there had been people who needed him. Seeing Tom catching his breath, Arthur spoke up. “Sadie and me are of a mind to go to St. Denis tonight and check out the theater there. Scope out the talent, and see what they ain’t got yet. If any of you are of a mind to wait on Fitcher’s or Starr and Baum getting here, might be a good way to make some money in the meantime.”

Sadie nodded at that, and he could sense her looking at the troupe, trying to read their mood. “We’ll see if we can talk to the manager too. Let you know what we see tonight if we’re back early enough, or else tomorrow at breakfast.” 

“Final pay packets out morning after our last performance. That’s all I’ve got,” Tom said. “Thank you all.” He managed a bright smile, despite his exhausted, bleary eyes. “My God, off to the cowshit and mirage-inducing prairie of New Caledonia again. What a life.” He scanned the group. “I’ll miss every one of you bastards.” 

They filed out, some of them stopping by Tom to give him a word of encouragement, a smile, even a hug. Sadie hung back, talking to some of them too, discussing something animatedly with Teddy. Tom looked at Arthur. “You and Sadie are due to go back to that land of yours this year, isn’t it?”

“Gotta be back by the end of the year, yeah.” 

He gave a snort of amusement. “You’d best come see me, then, or else I might actually die of boredom.”

“You’re likely gonna die of boredom,” he said wryly. “I know Felipe, and his treatments. He’s gonna have you on a couple months of almost total bed rest, the way you sound.” He still remembered those early days at Las Hermanas with little fondness.

Tom gave a groaning wheeze. “What fun.” He looked at Arthur, a glimmer of mingled hope and fear in his eyes. “You said you were worse off than me, though. And this fellow, your friend, he cured you.”

He wasn’t going to get into the difference between curing and treating. He’d leave that to Felipe, and it would be cruel besides to punch the man right in what few hopes he had. “I wasn’t just sick. I was nearly dead from it.” He sat down beside Tom. “Won’t tell you it ain’t gonna be a long road. You see how things is with me. I still gotta rest up sometimes, and not just age creeping in. My lungs ain’t what they was. But I’m alive. I ain’t bedridden. I got a good life. And yeah, I owe that to Felipe Garcia. So listen to the man. He knows what he’s about.” He grinned at Tom. “Besides, I know you. You’re gonna find some fine gal in Banner to charm into being your devoted nurse.”

Tom gave a quick cackle at that, though it turned into a cough, muffled into his handkerchief. When he could speak again, he gave a low chuckle. “Oh, more’s the pity I don’t have the energy to show any pretty lady a good time anymore.” Neither of them said it, but they both knew that the wasted, pale look of a TB sufferer didn’t exactly make for erotic enticement either. Arthur thought he could also sense that fear that he’d never have that again, that when he’d lain with a woman last, whenever and whoever it had been, he’d done it not knowing he ought to cherish the chance as one he might never have again. From how he talked, bluster toned down, he wished he could have been a family man, though he’d made the circus his family in the end. Arthur remembered that feeling, feeling blasted wide open by the news, flooded with mingled grief and fear, feeling every second tick by with the panicked paralysis of both too little future opportunity and so many past regrets.

“You’ll get better,” Arthur told him, trying to put as much soothing reassurance as he could into his tone. “We’ll be fine too. You done what you could for all of us. More than most would. They would have cut and run as soon as they got the diagnosis.” He patted Tom on the shoulder. “You deserve your rest.”

“Thanks,” Tom said, voice gone suddenly gruff, and Arthur thought that next cough might have hidden a quiet sob of emotion.

Leaving the man to his peace seemed for the best, so he headed over to Sadie talking to Teddy. “I talked to the troupe. Gladys and Fred definitely want to see if the theater can use them.”

He seemed to remember the theater having a strongwoman and a snake charmer in 1899, but who knew who might have changed in the meantime. Teddy continued. “The roustabouts are gonna look for dock jobs, that sort of thing. The joeys--well.”

“Not much call for clowns in the city,” Sadie agreed with a sigh. “We’ll still ask. Vaudeville’s usually in want of comedy.” 

“End of the week, you’re shipping right out to Starr’s in--Cincinnati, was it?”

“Gotta,” Teddy said laconically. But his bright muddy-hazel eyes were full of feeling. “I don’t like it, but I can’t wait around two, three months for them to come down here. Not with animals to feed, especially cats, and no place to keep them.”

“The animals need caring too,” Arthur reassured him, knowing Teddy felt this breakup of things as miserably as he did. The circus was family, and this cut deeply.

“You sure you two don’t wanna come with me to Starr’s? You said the boss man and their cat man--cat _lady_ \--knows you. Your Appies got sold there already. Seems damn peculiar to send good horses without you two and your act.”

Sadie shook her head, reaching out and putting a reassuring hand on his arm. “Starr’s has riders and a horse trainer, I’m sure. Arthur and me, we got a farm we need to get going, or we lose it. So I’m afraid our circus days is at an end. But give our best to Robbie DeFarge and Sally Nash. And Sombra--she’s the black jaguar.”

He’d miss the Appaloosas, Dot especially, and Bea certainly would. But he knew full well they couldn’t afford to buy six additional horses--he suspected Tom would try to gift them if he could, but Arthur would have to refuse that. He knew damn well the man would need his money over the next year or so while he was almost unable to work, and the next couple of years beyond while he was more limited still. Not to mention Tom was getting older besides, given he had to be nearing sixty, so he’d be slowing down anyhow.

Besides, it would cost a lot to stable them even for a couple of weeks, and he suspected it would be longer than that before they could head to New Caledonia. They had some money to their credit now, but not enough to call it good. Enough for a house or livestock, probably, and to do either of those solidly rather than cheaply, but not both.

“Anyone we can’t get hired here for the time being will likely want to head north with you. The aerialists, almost for sure. Train line might give a discount for sending more wagons, who knows.” Probably not, but it made for a nice fantasy. Some of them might be desperate enough to abandon their caravan here in St. Denis, and just buy a train ticket, make use of whatever bunk space Starr’s could find them, and hope to recoup their costumes and gear somehow.

Teddy nodded at that, already turning towards the circle of caravans. “All right. Do what I can to keep spirits up tonight. I’ll check in on Bea and Mattie too, OK?”

Sadie called after him, “Thanks.”

Grabbing Bob and Buell and saddling up, the road to St. Denis felt familiar enough in the gathering dusk that it was like time had folded in on itself, _now_ connected to then with invisible stitches. The same humid air, the same deep, dark smell of life and decay all at once, the same slow creep of the swamp reclaiming everything bit by bit. “Place still gives me the Goddamn creeps,” he muttered, reaching for a revolver instinctively.

“Gives _you_ the creeps, you say?” Sadie retorted. “We was hiding here a couple nights without even a tent to our name, before we managed to sneak back to Shady Belle and clear out to Lakay. Charles and me didn’t sleep for two nights worrying about Pinkertons and them weird Nite Folk both. To say nothing of snakes, gators, and all that.”

She’d rarely said much of anything about those days, and nights, where he’d been gone in Guarma, but he could imagine it now. “Seems like all we ever got of Lemoyne is a whole mess of bad memories. One disaster after another.”

“Can’t say I won’t be happy to ride away again,” and there was a grim, glum note to her voice at that as she spurred Bob on.

Heading into the city, the vapor coming off the swamp giving the cobblestone streets that almost ethereal misty glow in the streetlights, he still found himself holding his breath, braced for someone to say something, to recognize him, even as he told himself it was absurd. 

St. Denis. So much of the worst had happened here, including his TB diagnosis, the bank robbery fiasco, and discovering what Edith Downes had been brought to by his actions, but there had been a few points of unexpected grace. He’d met Calderón here, and she’d seen something worth believing in, even in a grown street brat. He’d met Rains Fall here, and he’d somehow seen a glimmer of honor in a thief, asking without pride for his help. Two people who had helped change his life for the better. Tilly and Mary-Beth made their home here, and thrived--Tilly was pregnant now, last she’d written. Even Mary seemed to have found a good life here, from what Mary-Beth had said. Strange to see that, when he dreaded the place so much now after all that had happened, and loathing big cities as he did anyway.

Hitched up outside the imposing edifice of the Théâtre Râleur, he looked up at the signs illuminated brightly in the gathering night. He gave Sadie a slight smile. “You did say we ought to see a show together. So here we are. Can’t say I never show you a good time.”

“Yeah, and I’ll show _you_ a good time next time we get a night away from the caravan,” she retorted, and he couldn’t help but laugh at that as he paid their tickets, and they headed into the theater, velvet curtain still drawn over the stage. “Quite the gilded monstrosity, ain’t it?” she whispered. “Maybe we should have been robbing theaters, not banks.” He felt himself laughing again, because somehow the joke made the city and the memories more bearable, knowing she understood the pain too and made light of it because of that, not from ignorance.

“Trouble is gold bars was far more portable than chandeliers,” he whispered back, and she chuckled at that. 

As the lights went down, he reached out, putting his arm around her, gratified to feel the way she leaned into it. They were here for business in one sense, true, but that didn’t mean they couldn’t enjoy it, and being here with a woman he loved, feeling how natural it felt to put an arm around her, helped take away the memory of the last time he’d been here, long ago, with Mary. Accepted her impulsive offer to go to the theater with her, even knowing himself for a fool in doing so, and bringing the yearning back to life. Youthful fantasies in two people getting into their middle years, and hurting each other again by it. It turned out for the best. They’d come back to St. Denis and the old wounds and nightmares were there, but perhaps now he was strong enough to endure that return in a way he couldn’t years ago.

~~~~~~~~~~

The acts weren’t bad, and she could eye them with the view of a performer herself now. Though she admitted sitting there, Arthur’s arm around her for most of it, leaning into him, made it as much pleasure as business, and she saw no trouble with that. Giving due applause and cheers, laughing at Arthur’s enthusiasm for it, she felt her spirits lift in a way they hadn’t in months.

True, they’d known they’d have to come back anyway before the end of the year. This would have been their final season with Stellar and Spangler anyway, but to leave early, and with the troupe completely breaking up, hurt. She didn’t say it to Arthur either, but she hoped Tom was strong enough to survive his TB. He’d caught it earlier, and rested as much as he could--which for an energetic force of nature wasn’t much--but he was twenty years older than Arthur had been. But if anyone could help, it would be Felipe.

What the two of them did now--well. They’d see about getting other people settled first, then turn their minds to that problem. Wasn’t as though a riding and shooting act like theirs could play in a vaudeville theater, and Fitcher’s or Starr’s wouldn’t want to hire them for just a few months. Plus the horses were already sold to Starr’s anyway.

“You’re thinking too much,” Arthur murmured lowly, leaning his head down to keep his voice quiet. “I can tell.”

“How you know that?”

He nodded towards the stage, and the French dancers energetically kicking away, arms locked back-to-back in a rotating circle. “You got that on stage and you’re a thousand miles away?”

She put two fingers to her lips and gave an enthusiastic whistle. Couldn’t resist quipping softly to Arthur, “Gotta show appreciation for the artistry, of course.”

“Oh, of _course_ ,” he said. “Pretty girls kicking up their skirts ain’t got nothing to do with it.”

She reached over and gave a soft, playful shove to his shoulder. “Fine, I ain’t blind. You know you’re the only one I want anyhow.” It always touched her that he could be so matter-of-fact about her also liking women, though she supposed the trust and confidence he had that he was it for her, no matter who she might happen to see appreciatively, helped. Didn’t hurt that he’d been the one who made it all right to acknowledge that part of herself either by saying he’d looked at a few men that way in his time. It didn’t matter. There were pretty women, and handsome men, and her mind and eyes knew it, but without her heart engaged too, it didn’t do much for other, more southerly parts either. Same way for him, it seemed. 

“Sure.” She heard the warmth in his voice, even in that single word. Then he turned back to business, almost as if flustered, keeping his voice low. “So we got a good firebreather and fire dancer, pretty can-can dancer gals, excellent singer, a magician who really likes being shot at and chained up, and a strongwoman. Could probably get them to take on Gladys easy enough, but Fred--”

She thought about it a moment. “We could try to see if they want Fred as a dual act,” she said, careful herself to keep quiet. “Lots of places got a strongman, a couple have a strongwoman, but how many can claim both? Fred’s kind of doubling up already as a strongman and the tattooed man.”

“Yeah, there’s something to that notion.” As the firedancer, Antoinette Sanseverino, twirled off stage in one last arc of flames, the announcer and manager came back to close the show.

The lights came back on, and Arthur took his arm from around her, giving it a surreptitious shake. “Your arm gone asleep?”

“Worth it,” he said, giving her a soft smile, and she couldn’t help but smile in return, heading out from the seats to turn towards the exit leading to the front of the theater.

“Arthur?” She watched him jump like a scalded cat at the sound of a woman’s voice saying his name, eyes going wide, and he turned towards her quickly. She’d seen him play various roles often enough, but it was a marvel to watch the sudden alteration in him here, and it wasn’t even a conscious thing. Hands grasped behind him, shoulders rolled forward, tension in his stance, like a man turning forty-four come summer suddenly transformed into an awkward, bashful schoolboy in the blink of an eye.

The woman stepped forward again. “It _is_ you, isn’t it?” Now Sadie placed her, though the only picture she’d seen was the one that disappeared from Arthur’s things, and the woman had been barely more than a girl there, dark hair in a braid. This woman was forty or so herself, wearing her age with grace, and the hair had some grey and was in a neat upswept hairstyle, and her figure had some matronly padding--from experience herself, Sadie would bet she’d borne at least one child. But the beauty mark on her cheek, the dark hair, the apparent fondness for large collar-style bows, hadn’t changed. 

So she knew before Arthur confirmed it. “Hello, Mary.” He glanced at the man behind her. Somewhat nondescript, Sadie would say. Medium brown hair, brown eyes, an average build, a pleasant but unremarkable face, but the concern and affection on his face as he looked at his wife were unmistakable.

“You’d be Mr. Peter Barrett, I assume,” Arthur said to him. “A friend of mine gave me the news Mary had found herself a fine man. Congratulations, sir, even if it comes a few years late.”

“It seems they’re due to you also,” Mary said, gaze flickering from the absorbed wonder of staring at Arthur over to Sadie. Somehow Sadie was suddenly grateful she’d put on a skirt for this, wanting to attract less attention in general in St. Denis.

“Sadie Griffith,” she said, breaking the tension by holding out her hand to Mary, almost daring her to take it. She did, a little to Sadie’s surprise, but she was thankful for it. “And thank you.”

Peter Barrett’s stance eased, now that he seemed to figure out that there wasn’t going to be a scene, and Arthur or his wife weren’t going to throw themselves at each other in some tawdry romantic drama. He offered Arthur his hand. “Mary spoke a little about you.”

She could hear that barbed edge of amusement in Arthur’s voice as he shook Peter Barrett’s hand. “Did she now?”

“Yes. She mentioned you were a childhood sweetheart of hers, but you unfortunately were in no circumstances to marry her before her father forced Gerald on her instead.”

A half-truth, but somehow she expected the whole truth wasn’t necessary in this case. “We reconnected for a brief time a few years back, but we figured out then we wouldn’t suit. Fine a woman as she is, some things ain’t meant to be.” Arthur looked at Mary, giving her one of those fond smiles of his, looking more relaxed now. “Seems you finally found what was.”

“I can’t say how pleased I am to see you so well and happy,” she said, and Sadie could hear the sincerity in her voice. “Your health seems a lot better than when I last heard from you.”

“I’m doing all right, sure.” 

“What brings you to St. Denis, though? I remember you wasn’t terribly fond. Bad memories and such.” She had to admire the woman’s delicate allusion to things.

“We ain’t staying, I’m afraid. Here to see some old friends, but we’re with the circus set up between here at Rhodes. For two weeks, anyway, until we head off.” He shrugged, arms folding across his chest. “After that, we got land--a ranch--that needs tending.” Not the whole truth either, but polite pleasantries all the same.

“You two have kids?” Sadie asked, trying to get the conversation to better territory, sensing the awkwardness.

“Three, yes.” Mary smiled, looking at Peter. “The older two can take advantage of living above a bookshop. Our baby, Theo, though--it’ll be a bit.”

“Got two ourselves,” Sadie said. “Our girl’s reading, our boy’s learning. Might be we’ll have to stop in and get some books.”

“Oh, please do,” Mary said, and the offer seemed genuine. By now everyone else had filed out of the theater, and even a quiet conversation seemed to echo.

“Bring your kids by the circus sometime before we go,” Arthur said, obviously at ease enough now to make the offer casual. “We’ll leave you tickets at the red wagon. The ticket wagon. It’s actually blue, though.”

“Then why--” Peter shook his head.

“Show parlance.” Arthur shrugged. “You pick it up, hard to forget sometimes.”

“You always did end up running with some strange folk, Arthur,” Mary said dryly.

There was a barbed undercurrent there that Sadie felt as Arthur answered, “Seemed the trouble back then always was our lives and our families. But that don’t matter now. We’re living the good lives we wanted.” He sketched her a bit of a bow, and Sadie recognized the flair he put into it for his finale bow in the show. “Hope you and your kids come to see the show, and it’s been real good to see you. But if you’ll excuse me, I gotta try to catch the manager of this place before he heads home.”

“You go,” she told Arthur. “I’ll be along in just a minute.” He raised an eyebrow at that, but then shrugged, nodded, and headed off towards the entrance of the theater, presumably to ask at the ticket counter. She glanced over at Mary Barrett. “Can we talk a minute?”

She was savvy enough to catch on that Sadie wanted a private word. She turned to her husband, putting a hand on his arm. “Peter, darling, why don’t you wait for me in the lobby?” He nodded, heading out after Arthur. From his expression, Sadie thought he hadn’t expected his wife’s old flame to be quite like he was. Had he expected shorter, less imposing? More cultured? Who knew.

Then they were the last two left. Sadie leaned back against the edge of a seat’s back, looking over at Mary. She got right to business. “You didn’t tell your husband everything about Arthur?”

She did Sadie the courtesy of not squawking about improprieties from a woman she’d just met. “He knows I had a youthful understanding that didn’t work out before my father sold me to Gerald.” Her dark eyes bored directly into Sadie’s. “I felt that anything beyond that didn’t have much bearing on Peter and me.”

She nodded at that. “Of course it was easier to not explain you was flirting with an outlaw when you was kids.” She held up a hand to quell any outraged protests. “Don’t get pissed. I don’t blame you. It’s smart, and you’re right, that past ain’t a concern of his. He don’t seem to look at Arthur as a threat--or at least, no more than any old sweetheart turned up.”

“You needn’t worry that I’m going to try to start up all that again,” Mary protested.

“Nah. You got a husband who loves you. Arthur loves me. Look, I ain’t trying to make this into me being some jealous shrew. I got no worries you’re after him, and none that he’ll chase you.” Mary hadn’t been there on Bluestone Ridge, or Las Hermanas, or anywhere beyond. She had so many pieces of Arthur, heart and soul, that Mary Gillis Linton Bennett had never touched. He wasn’t going to throw that away for a dream that he fully well admitted long ago was wistful foolishness. “I also ain’t here to yell at you for breaking his heart.”

“Really now.”

She gave an impatient shrug. “Yeah, you hurt him. But the way I see it, you both gave as good as you got. Neither of you brought out the best in each other, did you? Seems you forgave each other for that long ago, so far as I’m concerned, it ain’t my business.”

Mary’s stance eased, shoulders relaxing from their near-military set, and Sadie saw her working her jaw, calming herself. “Then if it’s not you wanting to tear a strip off me, what is it?”

This time she looked directly in Mary’s eyes herself. “I figured you needed to hear I ain’t out to get you. Folk expect women to be vicious to each other over a man. And for me? You didn’t turn him years back when you could, when you had cause. I know that. Just tell me you don’t aim to do it now. I’m sorry if it offends you that I’m asking, but I need to hear it so I can sleep at night.” It had been a long time since that fear had woken her, not since the early days at Las Hermanas worrying that somehow, someone had seen their escape to the south and Pinkertons might sneak across the border to capture him. She hated the waver in her voice as she said, “He’s a good husband. A good father. A good man. And he’s worked so damn hard for it. But the law don’t care about that, or how many folk he’s helped since.”

Mary uncrossed her arms, leaning against a seat back herself. “He sent me that letter, long ago now. Saying he had tuberculosis, and he didn’t know how long he had, but he’d seen how awful that miserable Dutch Van Der Linde was. And all he aimed to do with that time was trying to do good to make up for things.” 

“Dutch died last year, according to the papers.” They’d gotten the news in Panama, given plenty of Americans were there. Word of someone who sounded like Micah too at that, but he’d vanished like a wraith, only word of brutal killings in various places to speak for him. She’d been almost relieved for that, because if they couldn’t track him, Arthur wouldn’t need to go after him. “Killed in a fire after a botched robbery near Milwaukee.” Arthur had gone quiet for the rest of that day, struggling with the notion of mingled grief and relief, and she’d done her best to comfort him. The relief beat the grief in her case, but even she had a few fond memories of Dutch. Not enough to keep her from hoping hell was mighty hot, though. 

Mary’s jaw tightened again, and there was a savage satisfaction in her voice for a moment. “Good.” Sadie gave her a nod of approval. So they understood each other. Mary’s tone softened again. “All I ever wanted was for Arthur to see he was worth more than the life he was living. He did that, in the end. He’s...he seems like a very different man now.”

“He is. He keeps trying to be even better.”

“So I wish him, and you, all the best. As far as I’m concerned, I met my old sweetheart and his charming wife by happenstance, and Mr. Griffith is who he’s always been, isn’t it?”

Sadie couldn’t help but breathe a quiet sigh of relief. Fears easing, like Gladys’ python uncoiling from where it had been squeezing. She didn’t need to be afraid for herself, or Bea and Mattie, that Arthur would be snatched away like that. Mary had that power, but she didn’t want it, and wouldn’t use it. She reached out, risking taking Mary’s hands in hers for a moment. “Thank you.” She managed a genuine smile now. “He’s right. Please bring your kids for a show, our treat, and we’ll have to get books from you. We’ve been reading the same ones for a couple months now.”

Mary smiled back in return. “I’d like that.” She leaned in closer, eyes going wide with curiosity. “The circus, really? What do you two do?”

“Trick riding and shooting, mostly. Arthur does some of the announcing, since our main fella for it is sick.”

She gave a soft, ladylike snort of amusement. “Of course. He always was a daredevil as a rider. Used to win shooting bets too.” Pushing off from the seat, she headed up the aisle. “Good night, Mrs. Griffith. I hope we meet again.”

“It’s ‘Sadie’, if you like. But likewise, good night, Mrs. Barrett.” Heading out to the lobby and seeing Mary reunite with her husband and head out, she saw Arthur waiting near the ticket booth.

“Everything all right?” he asked, as the Barretts exited without a backwards glance, Mary taking Peter’s arm with the ease of long habit.

“Just fine.”

Ushered back and upstairs into the office of the manager and show presenter, Aldridge T. Abbington from both the plaque on the door and his on-stage patter, Abbington ushered them to two chairs on the other side of his desk, the small dark room cramped with papers and bric-a-brac. “Mr. Griffith here says you’re in show business?”

“We’re with the Stellar and Spangler circus,” Sadie answered him. “Set up out in Scarlett Meadows.”

“And you’re here to poach my talent?” Abbington gave a smile of amusement. “Is this a courtesy call to let me know that?”

“No, we’re here to see if you can use some of our performers. I’m here on behalf of our boss, Thomas Stellar. He ain’t well. Has TB, so the show is understandably being forced to fold so he can go seek treatment. We come back from South America to close with one last week here in the States, and there are other shows coming through in the summer, but we got a couple of performers you could hire until then.” Arthur shrugged. “Or if they like what you and St. Denis offer, perhaps they stick around.” 

Abbington leaned forward, clasped hands on his desk. “I’m listening.”

“Fred Wallace. Strongman, goes by ‘Earl the Earthbreaker.’ Tattooed, so that’s an additional perk.”

“I already have a strongwoman.”

“Hortensia’s good,” Sadie agreed. “But a strongman too? With two of them on stage, that’s even bigger feats. Plus you can add a skit to the act. Duel of the sexes. Or maybe a sketch where it’s stunts of strength as romantic flirtation.”

“Oh, that’s nice,” Abbington said, practically crowing in approval. “I like it. ‘The Wooing of Hortensia’. She finally meets the one man who can make her feel delicate and womanly!” Sadie somehow kept from making a face at that, though she felt Arthur’s knee nudge hers, sensing he was trying not to laugh.

“We also have Gladys Teitelbaum. ‘Polly, Peerless Python Charmer’. She has her own snake, Manny.”

“Would she be all right with a change of stage name?”

Arthur looked at Sadie, aware she knew Gladys better. Sadie shrugged. “Probably. She’s easygoing. Why?”

“My previous snake charmer, the Mysterious Maya, has quit now that she’s due to experience the mystery of motherhood.” He made a face. “Her husband is Ben Lazarus, so he’s still with me, but she won’t be back anytime soon. Anyway, Maya left only a few weeks ago, so if I could bring in Miss Gladys as another Maya, it’d be quite seamless. Same posters and all.”

“I’m sure you could talk her into it. We also got a troupe of clowns. Comedy, acrobatics, a lot of stuff you can easily use in vaudeville.”

“Might have to adapt it some. Clowns in costume and makeup on stage would look odd. Not their natural habitat! Vaudeville comedy is a lot more verbal than a circus act.”

“Sure, it can’t be in a circus cause it’d be hard for audiences to hear. They’ll be willing to learn some new things, though.” Jim would talk with them, get the group to figure out what they thought, and who was willing to try to become a vaudeville comedian in the meantime. 

“All right. What about you two?”

“No help to you, I’m afraid. Arthur and me are horse riding and trick shooting. Can’t do that in a theater.”

“Afraid not. I’m sorry for it. Is your circus performing on Sunday?”

Arthur laughed, sitting back in his seat. “Only in the evening. You know as well as me that Sunday afternoon shows are a fool’s errand.”

Abbington chuckled at that. “Indeed. So have anyone looking for an audition to come by at ten o’clock Sunday morning. That’ll have them back to you well in time for the evening performance.”

“Done.” They shook on it, and headed back downstairs and onto the streets, into the damp foggy evening. Arthur checked his watch in the glow of the theater lights. “Shit, that show was longer than I thought. It’s past nine. We gotta get back.”

If not for the chance the kids would wake in the night and find them not there, she’d have told him they ought to stay in town and ride at dawn. But they needed to save their money anyway, and she didn’t like the idea of knocking on Mary-Beth or Tilly’s door at this hour asking for somewhere to sleep, given they hadn’t even stopped by to say hello first after getting into town. She reassured him, “Someone got the kids to bed just fine.”

“I know,” he said, giving off a glum sigh, “but I hate when they don’t expect us not being there.”

They’d ended up away overnight sometimes, helping Teddy run advance in the next town, and the kids handled that all right, but she had to admit his point. It went much better when Bea and Mattie knew exactly how long they’d be away, and to not expect them at bedtime. “Of course. But they know it happens sometimes, and we’ll be there in the morning.” She gestured towards Buell. “Come on. Let’s get going.”

Picking their way through the wisps and wreaths of fog, heading away from the city lights into the darkened bayou, trying to not startle at every noise or movement, she felt like her heart didn’t stop its quicker pace until the familiar blue-and-yellow canvas big top came into sight in the moonlight. 

Getting Bob and Buell settled, they found Teddy still up with Tom at the mess tent, sharing a drink. “Here,” Tom said, gesturing them over and pouring a shot for each of them. “I couldn’t have done it these past months without you three stepping up as you have to help manage things.” He raised his glass. “To the end of the Stellar and Spangler, and farewell to some of the finest people I’ve ever had the privilege to know. At least those fucking Bartleby Brothers didn’t buy us out. But let’s make these two weeks one hell of a last stand.” He threw back the drink, and the rest of them followed suit. Rotgut moonshine, distilled from who the hell knew what along the way, but somehow, it felt true to this circus.

“Theater’s interested in Gladys and Fred, possibly Jim and the rest of the joeys,” Arthur reported.

Teddy nodded at that, tipping his glass over upside down on the table. “The Hawksburys and the rest of the aerialists want to throw in with me and come to Cincinnati to join Starr’s. Chuck was on the fence, but Charlotte and Cyril talked him into it.”

“That’s what always happens,” Tom said with dry amusement. “That boy can’t fart without his siblings’ say so. Good thing they approve of him being with Nancy, though it doesn’t hurt she’s a damn talented rope walker.” 

“Will you send a telegram to DeFarge and see if he’ll take them on now?”

Tom reached for the bottle again, pouring himself another drink. “Of course. He owes me a favor for the deal I gave him on the animals anyway. Arthur, Sadie, you said you’ve been around this Godforsaken Bible-thumping wilderness before. Do they even run a telegraph office on Sunday in Rhodes?”

“They do.” With that, Tom downed the second drink, and with a wave of farewell, headed tiredly towards his caravan, obviously needing the rest. She’d seen that exhausted stumble before in Arthur, and far worse. She had hopes at least Tom would do all right under Felipe’s care.

Teddy looked at them, shaking his head. “How you just stepped up to manage this, I got no clue. Folks panicking after Tom got the news, and then there’s you two, as cool as ice.”

“Don’t sell yourself short,” Arthur said. “You’re the one as knew how to run a circus, not us.”

“No, but you know how to run things in a crisis.” True enough. After stepping up to keep terrified people alive and hidden after the botched bank robbery, keeping a circus running and fears and egos both in check seemed simple enough. It was only understanding people afraid of the future with everything seeming to fall apart around them. She’d lost everything herself so recently then, so the pain and uncertainty wasn’t strange to her. “You said you worked as bounty hunters before Arthur got sick. Guess you saw your share of shit that taught you to keep your head and calm scared folks down.”

“Guess so.” She corked the moonshine jug, pushing it across the lantern-lit table towards Teddy. “Take this with you, huh? Tom’s gonna want it back in the morning, but I don’t want it in our caravan with the kids.”

“Sure. They got to bed just fine.”

Arthur stood up, gathering the glasses and putting them in the wash area for Yates and his helpers to handle in the morning along with the last of the dinner dishes. “Thanks for that. Good night.”

None of them wanted to say goodbye just yet, but damn, it ached all the same. It felt like she couldn’t find people she came to care about without having them taken away in the end by circumstances--the gang, friends in Chuparosa, the circus now. She only hoped New Caledonia could finally be something more stable. As to how they’d make the last of the money they needed, they’d figure that out soon enough. 

Heading into the caravan, as quietly as they could, they found their way easily towards their bed, even in the dark. She heard Dusty’s low happy whimper of welcome, and the low thump of him jumping off their bed to the floor to come and greet them. Reaching down in the dark, she patted him, getting her hand licked for her troubles.

“Momma?” The uncertain words came from the upper bunk of the two alone the left wall. Mattie had woken up at them coming in. He dropped off to sleep easily, like Arthur, but he slept lightly all the same. “That you and Daddy?”

“Sure is, baby,” she said, keeping her voice soft. “Everything’s all right. You can go back to sleep.”

“I can’t find Brian. Is he OK?”

Arthur’s voice came through the darkness too, hushed as well. “Here he is,” and obviously he’d found the stuffed bear that Gladys had sewn for Mattie two Christmases ago somewhere on the floor. “Bit of a tumble, but he landed just fine. He’s a good circus bear.”

Mattie giggled at that, and she heard the rustle of him settling down beneath the covers. “Night night.”

“Night night,” she echoed, smiling to herself in the dark.

~~~~~~~~~~

**Letter from Caroline to Sadie**  
Sadie,  
Given what you was writing about the circus in South America, maybe you ought to be selling all these adventures to your friend the writer. She seems to enjoy turning them into some real fine stories. Miss Dupont sells very well here given there ain’t much adventure left in played-out mining towns. Though I tell you that it half killed me to not be able to tell folk around here that my big sister and her dear Saint Bandit are the inspiration behind “Dawn Over the Desert Sage”. (Please tell me Arthur don’t actually talk like that, though.)

So like Adam and Sophie you two are finally going to head off to your quiet farm and peaceful life. I must say you make a real convincing sales pitch. Truth be told things here in Oregon ain’t all that anymore with the gold rush drying up, and so Harold and me had talked anyway about seeking other places. What you said about chasing nothing but dust all them years in Tumbleweed is good sound advice. We’re hardheaded, the two of us, but sometimes it ain’t worth the fight only to win the point rather than something of actual use or value. The business was good for a time, and now it’s not. 

If it was only us we might do, but these towns are no great place for kids, and they are leaving as fast as they grow. Josh and Tildy especially have got what education we can give, but they could use more in an actual school, and Robbie’s so bright he needs it, and I suspect Hannah will too. So it might be that Canadian settlement is just the thing from what you say.

Not promising anything, given we need to talk about it and see what the outlook is for setting up business somewhere in New Caledonia, but being truthful, it’s one of the better prospects we got. It would be nice to see you again after all these years, and meet your kids, and the apparent paragon you up and married. If he dotes on you half as much as I expect, you’re a real lucky one. 

Fondly awaiting three pages of you telling me how wonderful he is like the giddy fool in love that you are. Please send pictures of Bea and Mattie when you can. I know how fast they grow at that age.  
Caroline

 **Arthur’s Journal**  
Back in St. Denis and there are ghosts here, I know it. Didn’t go anywhere near the bank but all the same, the dread and memory was there like it all happened yesterday. But maybe it’s time I face all that.

Ran into Mary and her husband at the theater too, like something from a farce. Thankfully it went all right. Perhaps we both have done some growing that we could have a conversation without either spinning wild fantasies or bickering. She seems happy. Has something real, for once. That’s a comfort. If nothing else good comes of coming back to this Goddamn city at least I have that.

Not certain what comes next for Sadie and me. We’ll get through the last shows and figure it out. Right now that plus keeping a brave face for the kids, and the rest of the troupe, and the folks buying a ticket, seems too much to have space to figure all that out. We are OK on money but not nearly as good as we’d like to be before heading north. She deserves more than another hardscrabble start at a farm anyway.

If nothing else I suspect we shall take a few days to see Mary-Beth and Tilly so long as we’re here. Pay my respects to Hosea too. If I look at it as a chance to make my peace with things before leaving this region for good, that makes it more bearable.

( **Various sketches of circus people and all the acts,** , captioned, “I admit I will miss this life. It was like the best of the gang, but all greasepaint and spangles, not blood and lead.”)

(Tucked into the journal: **Photo of Sadie and Arthur in Cossack Karolov costumes in the center of the circus ring, Bea and Mattie on the back of two of the six Appaloosas** , with the note “Feliz Navidad en Lima, Diciembre 1906”.)


End file.
